


What There Isn’t

by hope_in_the_dark



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Tattoos, Asexual Aziraphale (Good Omens), Asexual Crowley (Good Omens), Asexuality Spectrum, Bisexual Character, Bisexual Crowley (Good Omens), Crowley is a Mess (Good Omens), Eli has his shit together a little bit maybe ?, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, I made Az’s name Eli this time don’t hate me, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), Ineffable Idiots, M/M, Slow Burn, tattoo parlors and bookshops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2020-10-18 02:29:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 60,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20631599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hope_in_the_dark/pseuds/hope_in_the_dark
Summary: Good things do not happen to Anthony Crowley, but when Eli Fell walks into his life, they start to.(Or: Crowley is a tattoo artist and Eli is a bookseller, and they spend a lot of time not being together before they figure out what love is.)





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> Hi!! 
> 
> I’m back!!! I’ve missed you all. This should be a shorter story (fingers crossed, but you know how it can be once I get going) because I don’t have as much time now that life is back to being, well, real life. I’ll also be taking a lot longer between updates for the same reason, so sorry in advance! 
> 
> Anyway, I don’t know how I feel about this really, but I loved this idea and decided to give it a go. Please let me know if you like it! 
> 
> Comments and kudos are so wonderful (as are you all)! 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this rambling piece of a thing. 
> 
> Hugs,  
Hope
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing that is proprietary, which includes but is not limited to Good Omens or any of its characters and quotes, Queen or the Beatles or any other bands, and any quotes or references to other books or movies that may or may not make an appearance.

Artists, as a general rule, are not overly fond of the mundane. Even those who paint landscapes and fruit bowls find something fascinating about their subjects; what might seem ordinary to one person might be something spectacular to another. Because of this, words like _mundane_ and _ordinary_ are not typically ones that find their way into an artist’s vocabulary when they speak about the things that they depict.

It shouldn’t be any different for tattoo artists, but sometimes it is. After the fourteenth twenty-one-year-old girl comes into the shop and asks for a simple line drawing of a wave on her ankle, single-line waves get boring. When the twentieth hopeless romantic asks for his partner’s name to be tattooed in flowing cursive on his chest, it makes sense that the artist might be sick of doing that kind of lettering (and he’ll probably do the work with a certain mindset of cynicism, because the odds are that he’s done at least as many cover-ups and removals of this type of tattoo as he has the tattoos themselves). Essentially, sometimes the subjects that tattoo artists are asked to depict are mundane and ordinary not because of what it is, but because of the repetition and lack of imagination.

That’s why Crowley refused to do generic tattoos. He saw tattoos as art, and he was unable to reconcile the idea of defiling the implicit beauty and creativity of a piece of art for the sake of making pocket change on overdone and uninteresting tattoos. For Crowley, skin was canvas and ink was paint, and he liked to have the freedom to be an artist instead of a forger.

He was the owner of Contrast Tattoo, a tiny one-room parlor wedged between a bakery and a coffee shop on a small side street in London Soho. A sign in the window said _“Open for Consultations, Work by In-Person Appointment Only.” _He never put a needle into the skin of a person he’d never seen before, and he never did work on the same day as a consultation. It was just how he did things, and it was completely non-negotiable.

Crowley was only in his mid-twenties, but he’d been doing tattoos on himself for nearly a decade and had been drawing and painting for longer than that. Tattoos were his passion, of course, but he still liked to pick up his sketchpad every once in a while and draw something real. His tattoos were always inventive and out-of-the-box, but occasionally he wanted to get back to the world. So, on certain Saturdays, Crowley would close the shop and walk to St. James’s Park to draw the world as he saw it.

Sometimes he’d bring oats for the ducks, and he would draw them as they ate. Other times, he’d sketch the blurring lines of half of an ice lolly melting in the gravel. Very rarely, however, Crowley would look up and find something altogether different, something with a soul and a life and a heart, and he would draw _that_ for the day.

These things were, of course, not things at all; they were people.

The people he drew usually didn’t notice. A young couple would be too wrapped up in one another to pay any attention to the pale, tattoo-covered young man sitting on the bench across the path. A college student reading on the bench would get lost in his book, and the near-silent scratching of Crowley’s pencil wouldn’t even reach his ears. A mother walking with her daughter would be too concerned with laughing at her child’s story to see the man peering at her over the rims of his dark sunglasses.

But sometimes they did notice. Once, an old man playing himself in a game of chess stopped his game to walk over to Crowley and ask what he was doing. Another time, a pretty blonde girl came over to flirt with him, and in the process she noticed the sketch of her profile that filled the open page in Crowley’s sketchbook. More often than not, Crowley would give away his drawing; he’d sign it and hand it over without so much as a hesitation. His life’s work was giving art to others, after all, so it never made any sense to be stingy about what he made.

On this particular Saturday, Crowley was sketching a fair-skinned man with hair so blond it was almost white. The man was wearing a pale blue button up that, upon closer inspection, had been mended rather poorly in several places along the seams. His tartan-patterned bowtie matched his socks, which were only visible because his tan trousers were shorter than they should have been. In short, the man dressed like he should have qualified for a senior’s discount at the cinema, but his face looked to be a good thirty or so years younger than that.

This wasn’t why Crowley was drawing him, though. Sure, he looked a little odd and his clothes were certainly interesting, but Crowley had noticed him for another reason entirely. In short, this man was the most beautiful person Crowley had ever seen, so his decision to put pencil to paper was actually more of a compulsion than anything else.

The man’s eyes were a monochromatic brown, the same shade as a bar of milk chocolate. The features of his face were all well-proportioned, and his cheeks seemed to be permanently rosy. Every part of him, from his cheeks to his jawline to his belly, was soft around the edges. He was feeding the ducks from a bag of seeds, a soft smile pulling at the corners of his delicate pink lips, and the shine on his fingernails indicated a fresh manicure. That smile made Crowley’s insides squirm a little, but he did his best to ignore that and remain focused on tracing the coiled lines that made up the mass of curls on the man’s head.

After a while, the man crumpled up the empty bag, apologized politely to the ducks for not bringing more to eat, and walked away. Crowley continued to draw from memory, working to capture every detail.

He was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t notice a shadow fall over the page.

“Did you know,” asked a soft, lilting voice from over Crowley’s shoulder, “that people usually ask permission before drawing strangers?”

Crowley jumped, dropping his pencil into the dirt as he whipped around to face the speaker. The beautiful man was standing behind the bench, his hands jammed into his front pockets and a small smile on his face.

“I don’t subscribe to the rules of ‘usually,’ mate,” Crowley said, trying desperately to slow down the pounding of his heart. The man gave Crowley a once-over, his gaze halting for a moment on the inked black-and-white reptilian scales that crawled up the side of Crowley’s neck.

“No, I don’t suppose you would. You don’t seem much like the type to play by the rules.” Oh, so the bloke was Welsh, then. Interesting. 

“I’m not.”

“Well, if you’re not going to ask permission, then at the very least we shouldn’t be strangers.” A well-manicured hand was quite suddenly thrust in front of Crowley. “I’m Eli Fell.”

“Crowley,” Crowley said stupidly, giving Eli’s hand a quick shake and praying that his hands weren’t as sweaty as he imagined they were (they were, but Eli didn’t seem to care).

“Pleasure to meet you.”

“Mmm,” said Crowley. Eli’s hand had been very warm and very soft, and he was having trouble catching his breath. It also didn’t help that Eli was staring at him again, apparently studying the other tattoos that were visible on Crowley’s arms.

It was summer, which meant that Crowley usually walked around in a black vest top tucked into pair of tight jeans. He didn’t see the need to spend too many pounds on advertising when he could do a very thorough job of it just by walking around London with his ink-covered arms on display. At the moment, though, he was wishing very much that he’d worn a t-shirt (or possibly an overcoat) because Eli’s intense concentration was making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Crowley was used to people staring, of course, but no one had ever done it in a way that made Crowley feel like a painting on display in a museum, which is what Eli was doing.

Finally, after a too-long silence, Eli shifted his eyes back up to Crowley’s. Crowley wasn’t wearing his sunglasses - he’d left them at home because it was overcast and he didn’t think he’d need them - but he immediately regretted that when Eli smiled. The sunglasses might have helped hide his blush.

“I like your tattoos.” This was, in Crowley’s opinion, a very underwhelming statement following a period of such intense scrutiny, but he at least knew how to respond to it.

“Thanks, I did most of them myself.”

One of Eli’s pale eyebrows arched up onto the middle of his forehead.

“That’s quite impressive.”

“Thanks.”

It was silent for a while. Eli stopped staring at Crowley and began smiling softly at passers-by. Crowley learned down and picked his pencil up off of the ground, dusting it off and twirling it in between his fingers. He kept glancing up at Eli, watching the small changes in his facial expressions, transfixed by the way small gusts of wind would ruffle Eli’s white-blond curls. In his mind, he took photos.

Four minutes and one poorly-edited mental photo montage later, Eli extended his hand again.

“I should get back. I run a bookshop, see, and I’m meant to be re-opening after lunch in a few minutes.”

Crowley grunted at him, and a low chuckle tumbled through Eli’s chest.

“Goodbye, then, Crowley.”

“See you.”

It wasn’t until Eli had almost vanished from view that Crowley realized he hadn’t even offered to give the drawing to him. He snatched his still-open sketchbook off of the bench and took off running, catching Eli just before he disappeared around a bend in the path.

“Hey,” he said a little too loudly, causing Eli to jump. “Do you want this drawing?”

Eli’s eyebrows sprang onto his forehead again, and Crowley’s heart flipped in his chest.

“I- um, that would be lovely.” Another soft smile, another one of Crowley’s organs turning to goo. He signed the drawing with a flourish and tore it out of his sketchbook, thrusting it into Eli’s hands unceremoniously.

“I hope you like it.”

“I do.” He hadn’t even looked at it. “Thank you.”

“Mmm,” said Crowley. He stayed in the same spot, shaken and unmoving, until long after Eli had bid him a second farewell and walked out of view.

That night, Crowley didn’t work on any tattoo consultations. He didn’t dream up any new designs for himself. Instead, he was drawing a bowtie-wearing bookshop owner, and he was very afraid that he might be falling over the line between admiration and infatuation.


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A second meeting, an explanation of Crowley’s thoughts on love, and a series of events in which Crowley gets many metaphorical kicks in the pants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! 
> 
> So, if you’ve read my work before, you know that I’m a big fan of some pretty legitimate angst, mostly of the interior-issues variety (because projecting my problems onto my characters is therapeutic as hell. Feel free to judge me for this). This is no different, and whether that’s fortunate or unfortunate is for you to decide. 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy this angsty/stupid mess! Thanks for reading - comments and kudos are always appreciated! I promise I’ll do my best to respond to you :)
> 
> Heads up for language.

The rubber soles of Crowley’s boots crunched through the snow as he walked. His breath made cloudy white puffs in the cool night air, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of a long black overcoat.

It was the middle of the night in the dead of winter, and the backstreets of Soho were nearly silent. Crowley was as unremarkable as a shadow, a single dark-clad figure winding his way through alleyways and sliding around corners. He never spoke, never made any noise apart from the muffled sounds of his boots on the ground, and that was the way he liked it.

Crowley liked being mysterious. He liked that people didn’t understand him, liked that they looked at his inked-up body and silver-pierced nose and lips and eyebrows and ears and were confused by him. He kept his hair cut very short on the sides, but he let the top grow long and piled it into stylish dark waves. He looked a little dangerous, really, and he liked that people didn’t know what to do with him.

His late-night walks, however, had nothing to do with keeping up appearances. Crowley was simply a twenty-something bloke with a crippling caffeine addiction and a need for a bit of time to do some thinking every so often, and so he found that meandering through the streets near his shop (and his small apartment above it) at odd hours of the morning was a good way to get that time to himself.

So, when Crowley sauntered around a corner and found himself immediately engaged in a full-body collision with another person, he was quite understandably irritated about it. The person who’d run into him - _he_ hadn’t hit anyone, of course, it was the other way around - gave a sort of squeaking sound and grabbed onto the sides of Crowley’s coat in an effort to remain upright.

“Oh, I am _terribly_ sorry, my dear fellow.”

Crowley’s blood froze in his veins. He knew that voice; that light Welsh lilt had been weaving its way into his dreams for months, and it belonged to someone Crowley had been trying very hard to forget he’d ever met. He’d lived long enough to know that it never did anyone any good to dwell on the past, so he’d been making an effort to not think about Eli Fell. Now, though, that very same man was holding onto Crowley’s coat like it was the last thing tethering him to Earth, and Crowley’s stupid heart skipped a beat.

Apparently, Eli realized who he was holding onto at approximately the same time that Crowley realized who was doing the holding on, because he offered Crowley a smile that should have melted half of the snow in London and said, “Crowley! Oh, it’s lovely to see you.”

“Ngh,” said Crowley, his conscious thought having momentarily abandoned him at the sight of Eli’s brown eyes and white curls and _damned stupid smile_. Eli also hadn’t yet taken his hands off of Crowley’s waist, a realization which made Crowley’s first coherent attempt at a greeting die in his throat. Finally, after a too-long pause that made Eli’s forehead wrinkle in concern, Crowley was able to force out an unusually shy-sounding “Hey, Eli.”

“What brings you out at this hour?”

“Just walking.” Eli cocked his head in confusion, so Crowley clarified. “I like walking the neighborhood at night. Clears my head, y’know?”

“Yes,” Eli said, punctuating the word with another warm smile.

Crowley offered him a smile in return (a rarer thing than perhaps it should have been, but Crowley _was_ fairly committed to his badass aesthetic) before remembering his manners and returning the question.

“What’re you doing up?”

“I’m a bit of an insomniac, I’m afraid,” Eli laughed. “A cup of tea and thinking calming thoughts wasn’t doing the trick tonight - not that it ever really does, I suppose - so I thought I’d go for a wander.”

“Ah,” Crowley teased. “Is it helping you fall asleep?”

“Not as such, but I’m glad I decided to do it, anyway.”

Crowley raised a silver-ring pierced dark eyebrow. “Why?”

“Well, I’ve seen you, haven’t I?” This was said matter-of-factly, like Eli had assumed that it was a very obvious thing that he’d just said. Crowley, to whom it had very much _not_ been obvious, almost choked on the breath that had suddenly taken on the feeling of cotton in his throat.

Finally, after a small bout of coughing and deep breath, Crowley said, “It’s good to see you too, mate.”

Unprompted, Eli reached out and patted Crowley on the arm. “You enjoy your walk, then. And if you ever have the inclination to pop by the bookshop to say hello, it’s a few blocks away - Quill and Ink, it’s called. I’d love to see you again sometime.”

It was taking Crowley’s brain a little too long to process all of that, so he barely managed to mumble out a quiet “Right, yeah, g’night,” as Eli walked away. He was left standing alone on a dark street corner, the ghost of Eli’s warm hand making the hairs on his ink-covered forearms stand on end.

Crowley shook himself out of his Eli-centric trance and scowled at his reflection in the darkened front window of a nearby boutique.

“You,” he said to himself, “are a fucking idiot with no self-control and a fat fucking crush on a man you’ve had two conversations with. You will _get over yourself_ and stop fucking around with your own feelings. You will go to a bar tomorrow night and meet someone nice and decently boring, and you will take them to dinner and have a good time, and you will not chase after that bloody bookseller.” With a huff and a final glare at himself, Crowley turned on his heel and walked back the way he’d come, stamping down small piles of snow with a little more force than was strictly necessary.

He did go to the bar, and he did meet someone nice and decently boring. He took her to dinner that weekend, and they walked around Shoreditch afterward, bouncing from bar to club to bar. They danced together at a club and he put his arm around her as they walked. Later, he kissed her up against the wall of a darkened alleyway, letting her slide her hands underneath his shirt and even going so far as to tangle her hair in his fingers. But, as always, he stopped before it went any further. When he dropped her home, she tried to invite him in, but he declined with a smile and a goodnight kiss.

She’d said that she’d call him, and he’d said that he was looking forward to it.

She didn’t call. He hadn’t expected her to.

It wasn’t that Crowley was romance-averse, exactly. He wasn’t actually opposed to the idea of being in love at all; it was the fear of falling out of it that built his philosophy around romance. No attachments, no problems. Easy fun, heavy kisses, pleasant conversations, and nothing more. Easy, yes. Boring, yes. Complicated, _never_. It had worked so far, and it was a sort of bandage to apply and reapply over the steadily bleeding wound on his heart marked _Loneliness_. It worked well enough that he never felt truly lonely, never really felt like he was missing much. If his heart twinged sometimes at the sight of a couple holding hands in public, he chalked it up to weakness.

He told himself he didn’t need romance, tried to convince himself that it wasn’t a thing he even really wanted. Some people, he knew, were built to not want or need romantic love. Some people were made to be content with other types of love, and he tried to make himself like them.

The problem with trying to be someone you’re not, though, is that eventually your real self will poke its stubborn head out of a crack in the facade you’ve built, and you’ll have to own up to all of it.

Crowley had woken up in the middle of the night, hands clutching at the cold empty sheets beside him. He’d dreamt that someone had been there, holding him and laying kisses in his hair, and he’d been _happy_. He stumbled into the bathroom and braced himself against the counter, looking at his bedraggled reflection in the mirror through the cracks in the mask he’d made for himself.

There wasn’t really anything for him to do, so he didn’t do anything at all. He just stared at himself, letting his eyes track the progress of the lines of ink that crawled up and down his chest and neck and arms. He’d made himself beautiful because he’d never thought himself to be so, and usually those black lines and patches of color made him feel better, more complete. But in the harshness of the fluorescent light and his own self-scrutiny, the ink made him feel like a fraud. It seemed like one more brick in the wall of self-constructed misery that he’d spent the better part of a decade building, and he hated himself for it. A scream of frustration lodged in his throat, and he smacked the palm of his hand into the mirror, right over the reflection of his face. He hit the light on the way out and crossed to his bed, flopping down onto his back and staring at the ceiling until he fell back into the arms of sleep.

In the morning, the self-criticism and crippling sense of loneliness had faded somewhat, and he got dressed with half a smile on his face. Dark clothes laid like a layer of paint on his brightly-colored skin, and he faced the day with the same devil-may-care attitude as always.

It wasn’t until he was being stared down by his best friend two weeks later that he thought about it again. She was talking about some bloke she’d met at school, her bright blue boots kicked up on the top of the desk in the corner of Crowley’s small flat.

Anathema was a sort of professional student. She’d been studying at university for as long as Crowley had known her (five years and change - they’d met one another at a poetry reading at a coffee shop, which wasn’t the type of thing Crowley found he actually enjoyed, so he’d never gone back) and had successfully earned undergraduate degrees in Sociology and Gender Studies and graduate degree in the Sociology of Health and Medicine. Currently, she was working as a graduate teacher’s assistant and attempting to figure out what to study for her doctorate thesis. Sometimes, when Crowley had an appointment with a client, he’d call Anathema and have her run the front of the shop until he was done. She also had developed a habit of dropping by the shop and letting herself into Crowley’s flat, which happened with such alarming regularity that Crowley had entirely stopped being surprised by it.

At the moment, Anathema had decided that Crowley’s lack of a love life was more important than her beginnings of one, so she’d made it the topic of discussion. “You haven’t told me much about the bookseller bloke in a while. Been by to see him, yet?”

“No,” said Crowley, flicking on the kettle and very pointedly ignoring making eye contact.

Something close to a garbled growl rumbled in Anathema’s throat. “He’s cute, right? And he told you to come by?”

“Yes, and yes, but I’m not going to.”

“Why?”

Crowley poured loose leaf tea into the pot of boiling water and scowled at it as it steeped. “You know bloody well why.”

The only warning that Crowley was given before Anathema’s skinny hand collided with the back of his head was the thumping sound of her boots hitting his floor and the angry huff of hot air that crossed the back of his neck.

“_Ow_, that fucking hurt!” He whipped around and glared at her, rubbing the short hair at the base of his skull and doing his best not to wince.

“You deserved it,” Anathema snapped. “Idiot.”

“I’m not an idiot, I’m _smart_. No attachments, remember?”

Anathema’s steel-grey eyes narrowed. “You _are_ an idiot. Actually, no, you’re more than that: you’re a coward.”

“Oi!”

“It’s true. You and your stupid don’t-get-hurt attitude, honestly.”

Crowley strained the tea and plunked a mug down in front of Anathema. He knew she took cream and sugar, but he was in a tetchy sort of mood (being repeatedly insulted by his best friend tended to do that to him, he’d discovered).

  
She took a sip, staring unblinking at him over the rim of her cup. “Really, though. Grow the fuck up.”

“No,” said Crowley petulantly. “_You_ need to learn to accept that not everyone needs romance.”

“Not everyone does, I know that. But you? You’re a big sappy romantic fucker, and you and I both know it.”

“Shut your mouth, An.”

Anathema, much to Crowley’s surprise, gave an exasperated sigh and did just that. They finished their tea in silence, eventually moving back to talking about the allegedly-cute tech geek that had helped Anathema fix her computer. She left after a while after giving his biceps a quick squeeze and asking him to send her a mock-up sketch of an interesting tattoo he’d begun to work on for a new client.

That night, Crowley lay in bed and stared at his ceiling, his long arms folded upwards and his fingers laced together underneath his dark head.

_“You’re a coward.”_

Those words were bothering him. They shouldn’t have been because Crowley was fine with his life philosophy on love; he shouldn’t have been worried about being perceived as a coward. He should have been fine, but he wasn’t, and that was pissing him off.

The thing about hearing a difficult truth is that it’s very hard to accept it as such. Crowley was also a particularly stubborn person, and so he was about as likely to admit to being a coward as a politician is to tell the whole truth. Crowley being real with himself had been known to happen, but it wasn’t a common occurrence at all.

He drifted into a restless sleep, dreams haunted by the words of curly-haired best friends and the tender warmth of chocolate brown eyes and the empty feeling of kissing people that he’d never allowed himself to love.


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley goes to the bookshop, and he gets a dinner out of it. 
> 
> He's also at war with himself, and he gets a not-so-gentle reminder about how terrible hangovers can be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I wrote the first part of this intending for it to be its own chapter, but it's way too short, so I added the second part and it got a bit long. Anyway, I hope you like it - I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments! 
> 
> To anyone who's read my work before and is here again: hello! I love you very much, thanks for being you. To those of you who are new to my writing and are kicking around the idea of staying for the duration of this piece: hi! I'm glad you're here, and I'd love to chat with you about your thoughts or questions whenever you'd like :) 
> 
> Heads up in this chapter for a LOT of language (for the record, language is the only reason why I rate my stories as Teen) and for mentions of alcohol and drunkenness.

Crowley was standing in the middle of The Quill and Ink, and he was panicking. There were just so many bloody _people_ around, all of whom seemed to be wearing light colors and broad smiles. Quite a few of them kept looking at Crowley as though they weren’t entirely certain what he was doing there, but an alarmingly higher percentage seemed inclined towards wanting to _talk_ to him. Thus far, he’d avoided being interrogated by an older woman in a hot pink tracksuit, had skirted around a group of college-age girls who’d been eyeing him like he was a piece of meat, and had managed to deflect a number of questions about his tattoos and piercings by pretending that it was too loud for him to hear. The whole ordeal was giving Crowley a headache, so he’d resigned himself to hiding in a nearly-empty aisle and trying to avoid eye contact with any of the overly-friendly bookshop customers who kept glancing his way.

In all truth, even _Crowley_ didn’t know what Crowley was doing there. He hadn’t really meant to go, but he’d seen a flyer for a weekend sale and had decided he’d drop in and have a look around (and that if he happened to see a certain handsome shopkeep while he was there, he’d make an attempt at starting a friendship). Now, though, he was deeply regretting his surge of impulsivity and had trained his eyes on the door, waiting for the perfect moment to get the hell out of the shop while interacting with as few people as possible.

Unfortunately for him, he’d been waiting for such an opening for nearly a quarter of an hour, and it had yet to come along.

“Fuck,” he said, and he grabbed the book nearest to his hand with the air of someone who hates books on principle (which wasn’t entirely untrue - he’d been an avid reader when he was younger, but somewhere along the line, he’d come to prefer television and movies).

The book turned out to be a copy of Victor Hugo’s _The Hunchback of Notre Dame_, which Crowley had not personally read but had heard quite a bit about. Looking at it now, he suddenly understood why he’d never bothered to read it; the thing was larger and heavier than most hammers he’d held in his life.

Crowley nearly found out just how deadly the book could really be. Someone behind him said “Hi,” and Crowley spun around, book held out in front of his chest like a shield. He only narrowly avoided catching the side of the speaker’s jaw, immediately flinching backward and finding himself leaning awkwardly against a shelf that seemed to be threatening to fall over.

“Sorry, shit, I’m- _oh fuck_, hi.”

Eli’s dark eyes twinkled with stifled laughter. “Watch where you’re swinging that - you might take someone’s eye out.”

“Hnng,” Crowley said with all the eloquence of a university student the morning after a blackout-level drinking binge (and immediately felt like slamming the book in his hand against his own head, because _idiot_). “Sorry, I just- nevermind. I, uh, I’ll do my best to bear that in mind.”

“I didn’t expect to see you here.”

Crowley shrugged. “I didn’t expect to come.”

“I’m glad you did.”

That made something go wonky inside of Crowley’s brain. Ordinarily, when he was in control of all of his faculties, Crowley presented himself as a smooth-talking, unflappable bloke without a care in the world. It was this type of attitude that had earned him many dates with many people over the years, and it was also what had drawn Anathema to him initially. Confident people liked to be around other confident people, and Crowley did his best to fit into that category. But apparently now, when he was face-to-face with a man who’d been consuming his waking (and sleeping) thoughts for months, Crowley’s ability to maintain this sort of confidence took a flying leap out of a metaphorical thirty-story-high window.

He hadn’t planned on coming to the bookshop, but once he’d gotten trapped inside it, he’d busied himself with planning what he would say to Eli if he saw him. In his mind, Crowley had come up with this: _“Hey, Eli. You seem like an interesting dude - d’you want to get a coffee sometime? I’ve done some literary-themed tattoos, and I’d like your opinion on a new one I’m working on.”_ The bit about the tattoo wasn’t even a lie; he’d just had a client ask for something based around a line from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, and he had no idea what sort of style to do it in. And coffee was good because it didn’t necessarily imply anything romantic. Friends went to coffee together, Crowley knew, and he’d hoped to establish a tradition of aggressively platonic coffee meetings with Eli.

But, because none of Crowley’s usual faculties were remotely within his control, all of these carefully planned words failed to make an appearance. Instead, Crowley said, “Dinner.”

Eli blinked at him. “What?”

Crowley blinked right back. He was just as surprised by this turn of events as Eli was, and after a moment of fighting the urge to take off running in the other direction, Crowley resigned himself to the mess he’d gotten himself into and said it again.

“Dinner. Would you like to go with me sometime?”

“Yes, I rather think I would.” And _oh_, there was that stupidly soft smile again. Crowley’s stomach made a little squirming motion, and he cursed himself for it before offering Eli something that was half-smile, half-smirk in return.

“Are you free tomorrow? Around half seven?” Better to get this over and done with. One dinner, and then hopefully something in the realm of friendly outings over coffee or tea in the future.

“That sounds lovely.”

“Good,” Crowley said. “I’ll be here tomorrow, then.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

_Platonic_, Crowley scolded himself. _Keep it friendly. Keep it easy. Nothing complicated._

So he schooled his face into something approaching its normal nonchalance and said, “Right. See ya,” before turning on his heel and marching through the crowd of people with a determination that only came from his desperation to get out of Eli’s line of sight before the hot blush that was rising in his cheeks broke out in full.

When Crowley got back to his shop, he was in something of a mood. He didn’t bother to flip the sign on the door, just left it on _“Closed”_ and marched upstairs to his flat. A few minutes later, he had a generous glass of scotch in one hand and his sketchbook open on his desk, and he proceeded to do his best to distance himself from reality.

Five hours, seven pages of sketches (which included an increasingly large number of Eli-related things as they went along), and a bottle of scotch later, Crowley stumbled from his desk to his bed and collapsed onto it face-first. The smell of his own breath made his eyes water, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“Yer a fuckin’ idiot,” Crowley told himself, speech slurred by the liquor and muffled by the pillow that was crushed underneath his head. “Ya fuckin’- _dinner_, what the fuck- y’like him n’ ya ask him to a bloody f’ckn’ dinner. Y’should’ve… _coffee_, for Chrissake. Fuck.” The world tilted at a dangerously steep angle, so Crowley closed his eyes, still cursing his own stupidity.

*********

The sun, Crowley decided, was a motherfucker.

It had crept in around his not-quite-shut curtains and was currently beaming him right in the eyes. Crowley hadn’t been this hungover in quite some time, and he suddenly found himself remembering why. Every part of his body ached. His brain felt like it had expanded in the night and was pressing against every corner of the inside of his skull, his stomach was doing very ambitious somersaults, and his legs felt like someone had attached ten kilogram weights to his ankles. He tried to roll over when he heard the sound of a key sliding into the lock - it was a one-room apartment and his ears were magnifying every sound - but he decided that he couldn’t be bothered and stopped moving.

“You,” a stern female voice said from the doorway, “are an idiot.”

Crowley groaned and pulled a pillow over his head (which took a lot more effort than it should have - how much did pillows _weigh_, anyway?). “Not s’loud, An.”

“I’ll be as loud as I want, you stupid man.” Anathema stomped over to the window and yanked open the curtains. The motherfucking sun suddenly became a whole lot brighter, and Crowley yelped and pulled the pillow down even tighter over his face. “Get up, Tony, or I swear I will drag you out of bed myself.”

“G’way,” Crowley grumbled. “Leave me ‘lone.”

Crowley couldn’t see Anathema, but he could _feel_ her smug smirk change the temperature of the room. “You have a consultation waiting downstairs, and you’ve got an appointment in an hour. _Up_.”

“No.” He knew he was being childish, but the thought of being vertical was not making his stomach very happy at all.

The hands that wrapped around the tops of his boots were small but surprisingly strong, and Crowley found himself moving backwards at a fast pace very suddenly.

“Stop! I’m getting up, ‘m getting up.” The hands disappeared, and Crowley managed to roll onto his back. Anathema had walked around to the side of the bed and was leaning over him, smirking.

“Be very thankful that drunk-you likes me more than sober-you does,” Anathema said, holding out her mobile to show a garbled text from Crowley that appeared to be a summary of his nighttime activities.

Very slowly, Crowley hauled himself into a seated position at the end of his bed. “Thanks for coming to check on me.”

Anathema rolled her eyes and headed for the door. “Yeah, whatever. I’m gonna go sit with the kid who’s here for a consultation - there’s a bottle of water, a coffee, and some toast on your coffee table. Be downstairs in ten minutes or I’ll bring your client up here to see the mess you’ve made of yourself.” The door shut behind her with a loud slam.

Nine minutes and fifty seconds later, Crowley walked into his shop, coffee in hand. He’d had enough time to fix his hair and put on a black jumper, but given the slow pace at which he was moving, he’d stayed in the same trousers as he’d been wearing yesterday.

“Sorry about that,” Crowley said, holding out his hand to the boy sitting with Anathema by the front window. “I’m Crowley. What can I do for you today?”

The bloke - “kid,” Anathema had said, and she wasn’t wrong; he couldn’t have been more than eighteen - had bright green hair and a number of interesting piercings, which made Crowley’s respect for him grow instantly. He raised an eyebrow at Crowley. “You good for this, mate?”

“I won’t be putting any needles into your skin today. It’s consultation only.”

A devilish grin stretched across the kid’s mouth. “Alright, then. I’m really into fantasy stuff…”

Crowley was still taking notes and asking questions when Anathema flashed him a questioning thumbs-up and motioned to the door. Silently, Crowley nodded and gave her a quick half-smile. She blew him a kiss and slipped out into the cold December air, her long blue overcoat whipping around her like a witch’s cloak.

“So,” Crowley said, glancing between his notes and his client’s shoulder. “We’re thinking something to do with a dragon? Geometric shapes, no color.”

“Right.”

“Gotcha. Give me… give me a week to come up with something. How’s next Saturday morning work for you?”

“Could make it work.”

Crowley put a note in his work calendar on his phone and shared it with Anathema, sliding his phone back into his front pocket before sticking his hand out for a shake. “Good to meet you, Seaghan.”

One corner of Seaghan’s thin mouth curled into a teasing smirk, and he took Crowley’s proffered hand and gave it a firm, quick shake. “Yeah, same. Take it easy on the booze tonight, mate.”

“Will do.”

The rest of Crowley’s day was fairly uneventful. He did a small, quarter-sized tattoo of a broken hourglass on the inside of a middle-aged woman’s wrist, and he had two more consultations that resulted in future appointments after that. At around seven, Crowley trudged upstairs and opened his sketchbook to continue working on a tattoo he was supposed to be doing on Monday and hadn’t quite finished yet. He thumbed through his sketchbook, and at four minutes past seven, he saw a sketch he’d done of Eli’s eyes and something clicked into place.

“Oh, _shit_.”

Getting ready for dinner was, quite simply, a thing which did not happen. Crowley jumped up from his desk, looked at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, decided he looked good enough (a phrase that Crowley didn’t even realize was in his vocabulary), and sprinted down the stairs and out onto the street while tugging on his overcoat.

The walk to The Quill and Ink was not so much a walk as a vigorous jog. As he ran, dodging other Londoners and nearly colliding with a few lampposts in the process, Crowley tried to think through the evening ahead. He’d intended to make a reservation at a nice restaurant, and he hadn’t done that. He hadn’t explicitly thought about it, but now that he was in his current situation, he realized that he’d wanted to be wearing a _different pair of bloody trousers_ than he had been the day before. Generally, Crowley had wanted to have some semblance of a plan and look somewhat put together, but neither of those things had happened. He was still mentally kicking himself for that when Eli opened the door.

Eli looked (unsurprisingly) perfect, and Crowley’s stupid heart noticed this and jumped a little against his ribcage.

“Hey,” Crowley said, still breathing a little harder than he would have liked. “Ready to go?”

“Let me grab my coat.”

Perhaps Crowley should have anticipated that Eli would be the sort of bloke to ask a veritable ton of personal questions, but for some reason, he hadn’t. They’d landed at a local chippy, and Eli was asking about Crowley’s background and opinions on things between mouthfuls of fried fish and potatoes.

“Where did you grow up?” There was a spot of grease shining on Eli’s upper lip, and Crowley was definitely not resisting the urge to kiss it clean. Crowley shoved a vinegar-soaked chip into his mouth, trying to let the slight burn of the heat and acidity draw his attention away from Eli’s ridiculously pretty mouth.

It didn’t work.

“London,” Crowley finally answered. “You?”

“Swansea. Moved here about five or six years ago, now. Bought the bookshop from the elderly couple who built it, and I’ve been running it ever since.”

“Mmm,” said Crowley. “D’you like it?”

“The books or the shop?”

Crowley stared at him. “Erm, both.”

“I love the books. It’s actually a bit difficult to part with them, really, but I have to make money somehow. The shop is also quite lovely; it always smells like paper and glue, and I get a good many interesting customers who keep me occupied.”

“Mmm,” Crowley grunted around another mouthful of chip. The thought of Eli finding any customers particularly interesting was making him irrationally jealous, so he gave himself a mental slap upside the head and swallowed his bite of food. “Glad you’re happy here.”

“I am.” A pause, and Eli gave Crowley the same type of searching look as he’d done the first time they’d met. It still made Crowley’s skin crawl a little; he wasn’t used to being looked at in a way that made him feel like the person doing the looking already knew that he was hiding something. “How did you get into the tattoo-parlor business?”

“Well, I decided to learn how to do them when I was around fourteen or fifteen, and it just never really made sense to do anything else. I got old enough to buy a shop, asked my parents for a bit of help to get started, and- wait. I didn’t tell you that I run a shop.”

Eli turned a very fetching shade of pink and nibbled on the corner of an oversalted chip. “Yes, well… I might have looked you up.”

Crowley’s eyes nearly fell out of his head. “You _what_?” In Crowley’s head, every single romance-related red flag was waving and alarm was blaring. For once, and for reasons that even he couldn’t figure out, he ignored them.

“I… well, you were interesting, and so I-” he flapped one pale hand around aimlessly “-Googled you.” Impossibly, the flush in Eli’s cheeks and ears was getting darker with every passing second.

“You don’t know my first name,” Crowley pointed out. “How did you find me?”

“It wasn’t all that hard, really. I just put in ‘Crowley’ and ‘tattoo’ and ‘London,’ and there we were.” A pause, and Eli brushed his greasy fingers daintily on a napkin. “And I do know your first name, now.”

“I don’t like it,” confessed Crowley before he could stop himself. He didn’t share that information with people; what was _wrong_ with him?

Eli’s eyebrows pinched together, the soft skin of his forehead creasing into thin lines. “Why?”

“Dunno. Just never really felt like mine.”

“Then change it.” The color of Eli’s cheeks was fading from a bright red to a dark pink, and he gave Crowley one of his excruciatingly soft smiles.

“Nah. I’d rather just go by Crowley.”

“No one ever calls you Anthony?”

Crowley flinched. “Just my parents. My best friend calls me Tony, but only when she’s pissed off.”

Eli laughed, and something changed in Crowley’s world. Things that had been dark and shadowed became a little less so, and his backstabbing bitch of a heart jumped into his throat. The laugh was high-pitched, and it was bloody _loud_, and based on twenty-five years of life experience, Crowley should have hated it. But he didn’t, not at all.

Crowley didn’t laugh very often, and even Eli’s laugh didn’t startle him into it. What Crowley did do, though, was break into a completely unchecked authentic grin. It was a reflex, really; it seemed impossible that anyone could hear Eli laugh without immediately feeling fifty pounds lighter.

As soon as Crowley realized what he was doing, however, he made himself stop. He’d never liked his smile - it was lopsided and a little too wide, and he’d worked for years to manipulate it into something more normal-looking.

When Eli stopped laughing, he leaned forward and laid his hand lightly on top of Crowley’s. “What should I call you, then?”

All at once, the anti-romance barriers in Crowley’s mind that had slipped a little over the course of the conversation snapped back into place. He pulled his hand back and set it in his lap, fixing a little smirk on his face as he said, “Crowley.”

Eli’s face fell for a brief moment. It was only a quarter of a second before the smile was back, reaching all the way into his warm eyes, but Crowley saw the change. The part of Crowley that longed for romantic love was feeling guilty about this, but the more experienced and powerful side of Crowley’s personality bullied it back into a dark corner of his mind and chained it there.

“Well, Crowley,” Eli said softly (and no one had ever said his name like that, damn everything), “thank you for the lovely dinner.”

“You’re welcome.”

On the walk back to the bookshop, Eli didn’t make any more moves to touch Crowley. There was an invisible wall between them that hadn’t been there before, something that stopped Eli’s elbow from knocking into Crowley’s forearm. When they got to the front stoop of the shop, Crowley asked Eli if he’d like to get a coffee sometime. Eli accepted, and after a brief phone number exchange, bid Crowley a polite goodnight and thanked him once more for the chips before ducking inside his shop and locking the door behind him.

Crowley should have been happy that Eli had understood his platonic intentions. He should’ve gone home and spent a few hours working on new designs for various tattoos without so much as a thought in Eli’s direction. He should have been grateful that he’d avoided anything really complicated, should have been pleased with the outcome of the dinner.

And yet, he wasn’t. Something cold and slimy had settled in the center of Crowley’s heart, and he knew that it wasn’t going to leave.

“This is good,” Crowley said to his ceiling fan. “Really, it’s good. I can find someone to have fun with tomorrow.”

He went to a bar the next night, and he met a handsome bloke with good hair and a kind smile. They talked for a while, and Crowley smiled his perfected, toned-down smile, and the guy touched his arm and laughed a lot. At the end of the night, Crowley leaned in to extend his typical invitation to dinner and dancing, but the words lodged in his throat. So, he said, “See you around,” and kissed the bloke lightly on the lips, getting up from the bar and walking out the door without so much as a backward glance.

When he got home, Crowley took a shower that was a little too hot and stayed there for a little too long, letting the water sluice over his body until it ran cold.


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I literally don’t know how to describe this chapter other than that it’s simultaneously introspection- and dialogue-heavy, which is weird. 
> 
> Sorry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I... do not know what to make of this. Just building up some conflict, giving us some drama, and spending an excessive amount of time inside Crowley’s head. 
> 
> Please feel free to give me your thoughts!! Comments are never ever a burden - I promise that I’ll read them and do my best to write back! 
> 
> Thanks for your support. Love to you all!

His hands were in Crowley’s hair and his mouth was on Crowley’s and his soft, round body was pushing Crowley’s thin one into the wall. Crowley was letting it happen, just tasting cheap wine and smelling the subtle spice of cologne, kissing back and getting kissed and getting lost in all of it. Eventually, one of Crowley’s hands abandoned its post on the wall, and his long fingers tangled in pale white curls.

Eli pulled back a bit, his slightly-upturned nose resting against Crowley’s. It took a moment for his eyes to open, but when they did, Crowley’s mind went blank and his other hand came to rest on Eli’s soft waist. Eli smiled at him, then, and Crowley could feel a smile of his own beginning to tug at one corner of his mouth, and so he leaned down again to kiss the grin off of Eli’s face, and he pulled their bodies back together, and he…

...woke up to the sound of his alarm with his face mashed into his pillow, hands grabbing at nothing but the soft top of his mattress.

“Fuck.”

Crowley had never really had a right side of the bed, so to speak. He was always grumpy in the morning, but there was a certain cathartic element to his routine of getting up and grumbling his way around the flat for an hour before the caffeine from his first cup of coffee kicked in and gave him a slightly pleasanter edge. Generally speaking, even when he’d slept fine and wasn’t dreading the activities of the day ahead, Crowley hated mornings with such passion that it was almost a personality trait.

Needless to say, though, Crowley’s morning moods were infinitely worse when something had gone wrong (like, say, having a dream about kissing a devastatingly beautiful man who is also your friend and who will be meeting you for coffee in a very small number of hours). So, Crowley went through his usual grumbling routine with an added air of hatred. He finished one cup of coffee and poured himself another one immediately, hoping that it would get his mind thinking about something else. It, predictably, didn’t.

This is why Crowley stomped downstairs and opened the shop looking like he was waiting for an excuse to clobber someone over the head with a bit of lead piping, and it’s also why he scowled at the green-haired bloke who came in for his scheduled appointment.

“Hi,” said Seaghan. “Morning.”

Crowley glared at him. “Yeah, morning. Ready?”

Approximately three hours later, the bell over the front door chimed to announce a new arrival, but Crowley didn’t hear it over the buzzing of the needle. He was doing the last few lines of detail work, just tracing out tiny triangles and diamonds and wonky rectangles to form the shape of a dragon’s face. Under his hand, Seaghan’s muscles twitched slightly, and Crowly looked up at him with narrowed eyes.

“Oi, hold still. Almost done.”

Seaghan was biting his lower lip, eyes trained on the ceiling. “Sorry.”

Fleetingly, Crowley wondered how Seaghan had tolerated the pain of having various pieces of metal attached to parts of his face and ears, but he decided that that particular issue was someone else’s problem and bent back over Seaghan’s shoulder to finish everything off.

Just as he’d lowered the needle to do the final triangle, Seaghan’s entire body stiffened, and Crowley barely avoided permanently marking the kid’s skin with a wonky black mark.

“Seaghan, mate, if you don’t want me to fuck this up, you’re going to have to _hold fucking still._”

“Sorry,” Seaghan said again, staring somewhat vacantly over Crowley’s right shoulder and not relaxing his muscles at all.

“What’re you- fuckin’ hell, can you please relax so that I can-” Crowley turned around to see what Seaghan was staring at and wound up with his nose a few inches from what appeared to be a crushed velvet waistcoat. “Oh. Hey, Eli.”

“Good morning, Crowley. Am I early? You said eleven.”

It would probably be easier for Crowley’s heart to follow the commands of his brain if Eli’s voice wasn’t so nice. Or if Eli wasn’t beautiful, or if the warmth of his eyes didn’t make Crowley feel like kissing him, or if his hands didn’t look (and feel, Crowley remembered with a flash of pain) so soft. But Eli was and had all of those things, which Crowley’s back-stabbing bitch of a heart took as permission to make Crowley feel all of the things he did his best to avoid feeling.

Crowley gave a barely perceptible shake of his head to clear out the memory of his dream and glanced at his watch. “Nah, you’re right on time. I’m the one who’s running behind, sorry about that. Just taking a bit longer to finish this because someone-” another glare (this time riding the edge of teasing because he was making an effort to lighten up for Eli’s sake) was cast in Seaghan’s direction “-refuses to sit still for five minutes.”

Eli’s soft chuckle made the room brighten considerably, which Crowley ignored by scowling and tapping Seaghan on the arm to get him to relax. The tap seemed to bring Seaghan crashing back to reality because he flinched a bit before settling back against the chair, head still turned toward Eli.

Crowley turned the needle back on and finished marking out the final three lines of the tattoo before spinning around to talk to Eli. “Right, I’ve got to clean this and wrap it up and then have a chat with Seaghan about taking care of it - would you mind hanging about for the next twenty or so minutes? ‘M really sorry.”

“Of course! Take as much time as you need - I’ve got a friend watching the shop today.”

With a quick nod of thanks, Crowley stepped over to the other side of the room to gather the supplies he needed to clean and wrap Seaghan’s shoulder. When he sat down again at the chair, Eli and Seaghan were chatting about something.

“I’ve never actually been to the art museum,” Eli was saying, smiling fondly at Seaghan. “I’ve heard absolutely wonderful things, though.”

Seaghan was grinning. “Oh, it’s brilliant. I’m actually an assistant curator at the National Gallery; if you’re ever interested in taking a look around, I’d love to show you.”

Crowley wiped some of the soap suds off of Seaghan’s shoulder with a bit too much force. Just because that _sounded_ like an offer of a date didn’t mean it _was_ one. Besides, even if it was, he didn’t care who Eli went on dates with (a statement which was true in all respects except for the fact that it was entirely a lie. Crowley cared very much, but to his credit, he was making a Herculean effort not to).

It took half a moment for Crowley to process what Seaghan had said, but when it sunk in, he leaned back in shock, dark eyebrows rising to midway up his forehead. “You’re an assistant curator?”

It didn’t seem possible for Seaghan’s smile to get any wider, but somehow, it did. “Yeah. Had the job for about five or six months, now. Art History degree, experience at a couple other galleries in town, had a friend in the alumni network put in a good word, and there we were.”

His back was turned, but Crowley could practically feel the warmth radiating from Eli’s smile as he voiced the exact same thing that Crowley was thinking. “I hope this isn’t rude - Seaghan, was it? - but you don’t really seem… well, to be frank, you don’t look old enough to have earned an undergraduate degree and have job experience.”

“I get that a lot.” And damn him, the bloody bastard _winked_ at Eli (and Crowley might have tugged a bit too hard on the plastic wrap he was applying, but that was pure coincidence). “I’m actually twenty-five. I started uni early and moved on from there.”

“Fascinating,” Eli said. Crowley heartily disagreed, but he didn’t say anything and went to pick up a brochure on tattoo care. When he came back around the corner, Eli had moved closer to the chair and was standing by Seaghan’s head, his body bent a little in a manner that suggested a bit more than casual interest.

“... could show you my favorite exhibits, if you’d like-” Seaghan’s smooth voice was grating on Crowley’s nerves a bit, so he didn’t feel too bad when he interrupted.

“Right, so here’s what you’ll need to do to keep it from getting infected.” Crowley squished down the hot flicker of jealousy rising in his chest and shoved a pamphlet into Seaghan’s hand. He explained the steps of care and the necessary supplies with the same careful precision as he usually did because he never wanted to be in a position where his lack of instruction caused someone to get an infection; if one of his clients didn’t follow his directions and something went pear-shaped as a result, then that was on them.

“Any questions?” Crowley asked tersely. He was very pointedly not noticing that one of Eli’s gentle hands had come to rest next to Seaghan’s on the arm of the chair.

Seaghan smiled at him, and Crowley resisted the urge to punch him in the teeth. “Nah, I’ve got it. Thanks, mate.”

“Welcome.”

Since they’d already gotten payment out of the way beforehand, Crowley was expecting Seaghan to get up and leave. He shook Seaghan’s hand and stepped out of the way, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his too-tight dark jeans and doing his best to adopt a posture of nonchalance (a posture which, given his current state of emotional agitation, wasn’t remotely in the neighborhood of what he’d been shooting for).

And then the smug-faced, green-haired, admittedly-fairly-attractive git had the gall to turn and ask for Eli’s number, and Crowley’s vision went red and fuzzy at the edges. It only got worse when Eli, whose face had gone quite pink, typed his phone number into Seaghan’s mobile and handed it back with one of those painfully soft smiles. When Seaghan finally left, it was with a final thank-you to Crowley and the promise of a museum date to Eli, and Crowley found that breathing was a thing he wasn’t doing very well.

“Are you alright, Crowley?” Eli’s lilting voice was tender with genuine concern, and little worry-lines made cracks across his forehead.

“Fine.” Crowley swallowed the lump of jealousy in his throat and forced a half-smile onto his face. “Just didn’t sleep well last night, that’s all.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that. I’d recommend a remedy, but none of the ones I use seem to really work,” Eli joked, laying his hand on Crowley’s shoulder for a fleeting moment before yanking it back like he’d been burned.

Crowley’s heart clenched at that, but he brushed his feelings aside and stretched his smile out into a smirk. “Ah, so I shouldn’t expect that my habit of wandering the streets at night is going to help my sleep?”

Eli laughed. “Well, if it hasn’t helped so far, I very much doubt that it ever will.”

“Fair enough,” Crowley said. “So. Coffee?”

“Mmm, yes. It’s nearly lunchtime, now - does this cafe of yours serve sandwiches?”

“Yeah.” Striding over to the door, Crowley flung it open and held it for Eli, letting the blast of cold air cool down his emotions. He didn’t have a right to be jealous, and he knew it. It’s possible that he could have done all of the things that his heart wanted him to do if he’d wanted to, but he was committed to his no-romance policy. It made things simpler. The world was a complicated enough place when he only had to worry about himself, his business, Anathema, and his parents.

Romantic relationships were tangled messes of emotions and thoughts and miscommunications, and they also required something that Crowley was unwilling to give: trust. The basis of any functioning relationship is vulnerability and the belief that the person on the recieving end of it isn’t planning on fucking it up. Essentially, Crowley knew that to be in a relationship, he’d have to rip his heart out of his chest and put it in the hands of another person and that asking them nicely not to tear it to bits would be the only thing he could do to protect it. He didn’t like that. He’d met enough assholes in his life to know that a lot of people take pleasure in driving knives through other people’s hearts, which was strike number one against trust. Strike two was that even people who are overall kind-hearted still make mistakes, and those mistakes often wind up with them holding the mangled remains of someone else’s heart.

Crowley’s third and final strike against trust was that the people who are supposed to love you often do a terrible job of it. His parents had helped him start his business, but after he’d figured out that he liked both men and women and told them about it, they distanced themselves from him. Now, if he called home, they usually didn’t answer, and if they did, there was always some reason for them to get off the line within the first ten minutes of conversation.

So, Crowley figured, love couldn’t be all that it was cracked up to be if the people you’re supposed to trust the most are spectacularly failing at being trustworthy. But Crowley was, deep down, a romantic. He liked to see people in love, liked to know that somehow, sometimes, people figured it out. He envied them their trust, and in his quiet moments, he occasionally wished that he could have someone to love. But in the end, Crowley wanted to be safe, and so he orchestrated his life so that he was.

Well, it might perhaps be more accurate to say that he _had been_ safe. Things, as they tend to do, had fallen apart, and it was entirely the fault of a fair-haired bookseller with a Welsh accent and terrible taste in clothes who was telling Crowley the story of how he’d fallen in love with the works of Oscar Wilde over steaming mugs of coffee.  
Crowley didn’t quite realize it, but the walls of the safe fortress he’d spent his whole life building had begun to crack. The tricky thing about this was that the only reason they were falling apart was because he’d built them in the first place.

“You know,” Crowley said slowly when Eli finally stopped to take a breath and a sip of his (cream-and-sugar laden) coffee, “I’ve never actually read any Wilde.”

Eli’s mug hit the table with a full thunk, and his lower jaw made an attempt to follow after it. “You’ve never- how can you not have- oh, _Crowley_, you can’t be serious.”

Crowley smirked at him. “As a bloody heart attack, mate.”

“But what about university? Didn’t you take any literature classes?”

“Didn’t go to uni.”

“Oh,” Eli said meekly. “That explains it a bit, then.”

“A bit,” Crowley agreed.

“You still could’ve picked up one of his novels, though. Or a play - _The Importance of Being Earnest_ is quite wonderful, I think you’d enjoy it rather a lot - or an essay. Just… _Wilde_, you know?”

“I’ve heard _about_ him, Eli, it’s not like I live entirely under a rock. I’ve just never gotten around to reading any of his stuff. Not really a big reader, honestly.”

The tendons in Eli’s jaw were working very hard to keep it from falling to the tabletop, and Eli’s soft eyes kept growing wider with everything that Crowley said. He looked a bit like a cartoon character, really, and Crowley found himself stifling a laugh.

“You don’t- you don’t _read_?”

Crowley downed the last bit of his coffee in one gulp. “Not so much, no.”

“But you came to the sale at my shop.”

_Yes_, Crowley thought but didn’t say. _Because I’m an idiot and because I wanted to be your friend, which I thought it would be easier than this._

What he said was, “Yeah. You invited me to come, so I did.”

“Oh.” Eli looked and sounded extremely chuffed and a little breathless, but Crowley convinced himself that he was imagining the pink tinge in Eli’s cheeks. It didn’t bear thinking about, really. There wasn’t any point.

“Yeah, it’s… you asked. Never mind.”

The silence that followed stretched for many long moments. Crowley drummed his black-painted nails (he’d been experimenting with polish colors and thought that the black coating looked sort of nice, so he’d left it) on the wood of the table, looking out the window over Eli’s shoulders and trying not to shiver when his friend fixed him with the same studying gaze that he’d had trained on him a couple times before.

“I’m very glad you came that day, you know.” Eli’s voice was unbearably tender, and Crowley shivered.

“You are?”

“Yes,” Eli said, turning his attention back to his coffee and humming softly in satisfaction after he took a long sip. “I think it was fate, sort of.”

Crowley flinched. “Don’t believe in fate.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would. But I do. I think it was fate because if you hadn’t come in, we might not have gone out for chips, and we might not have exchanged phone numbers, and we might not have met for coffee today.”

“Huh,” Crowley said noncommittally.

“Well, it’s fate for me, anyway. Fate and good fortune, really. I needed a… well, a _friend_, and here you are.”

“Mmm.”

“I’m really happy that I met you, Crowley,” Eli insisted. “Even though you don’t read books and haven’t read Wilde and drink black coffee - that’s revolting, honestly, do you not have tastebuds? - and don’t always have much to say. But I just… you’re good for me, I think.”

Crowley had been called a lot of things in his life. His teachers used to call him a “troublemaker.” His parents used to call him a “ball of energy,” which was a bad thing more often than it was a good one. Anathema called him everything from “fucker” to “idiot” to “best friend,” and he was fine with the whole range because she usually had a fair point. But never, not once, had someone looked at Crowley and said _“you’re good for me.”_

“I’m not good for people,” Crowley finally managed to say. “It’s not really a Thing with me, being good for people.”

This, apparently, did not faze Eli in the slightest. “You’re a puzzle, that’s for sure, but you’re definitely good for me. You make me think about things differently.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” Eli said, and his easy smile curled into something close to a teasing smirk. “Like what the world would be like if I was a person who hadn’t read Oscar Wilde.”

“Shut up,” Crowley grumbled, but he smiled a bit anyway. “Drink your bloody coffee.”

Eli giggled into his mug, and Crowley softened.

The following morning when Crowley unlocked the door to his shop, he found a brown-paper-and-plastic-wrapped package sitting off to the side of the doorway.

For the entire business day, a used copy of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ sat on the front desk of Contrast Tattoo, lying open to the inside cover. None of the patrons paid it much attention, but Crowley noticed it every time he made an appointment in his computer or collected payment from a client. There were three words there, scratched in blue loopy handwriting, and they were the water that was slowly but surely filling Crowley’s lungs.

_Just in case._


	5. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A lot of conversations (feat. Crowley attempting to lock away his emotions, failing miserably, and then doing something stupid).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This got very long. I don't know what to say here other than sorry for the forthcoming emotional pain in this chapter; I promise I will fix it. It might seem impossible, but I swear that I have a plan for getting Crowley to stop being a complete and total walnut.
> 
> Heads up for language, as always, as well as for mild discussions of family issues and a lot of introspective angst. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Feel free to leave me comments and share this story with people you think would enjoy it!! I love you all very much - every single one of your kudos and comments brings me immeasurable amounts of joy.

Anathema was sitting on the counter in Crowley’s tiny kitchen, swinging her legs back and forth like a child and chatting to him as he cooked.

“How’s Eli?”

“Fine,” Crowley growled. “He’s got a boyfriend.”

“He’s _what_?”

“In a relationship.” The pasta sauce that Crowley was working on was bubbling a bit too aggressively, so he turned the heat down and scowled at the pot of noodles that wasn’t boiling quick enough for his liking.

“When the _fuck_ did he have time to get a boyfriend? Last we talked about him - which was two weeks ago, if I’m not mistaken - he was single and the two of you fools were having regular coffee dates.”

“Things change, An,” Crowley said tersely. “And they weren’t _dates_. They were never dates.”

Anathema jumped off the counter and laid a hand lightly on Crowley’s shoulder. “Are you… I dunno, are you alright?”

“Of course I’m bloody alright.” He shook her hand off of his arm and reached to strain the noodles (which were still right on the edge between _too hard_ and _al dente,_ but he needed something to do with his hands). “Why wouldn’t I be alright? I want him to be happy, he’s my _friend_.”

Steam rose in light clouds around his head as he poured the still-boiling-hot pasta water down the drain of his kitchen sink, obscuring his vision and making the world go white for a moment. When it cleared, Anathema was standing next to him again, looking at him as though she was worried that he might break into pieces at any moment.

“You like him. That’s why you wouldn’t be - _aren’t_ \- alright.”

“I don’t like him.” _Liar._

Anathema rolled her eyes and helped Crowley serve the pasta. “Right, I forgot. It’s totally typical for you to get embarrassed at the sound of your friends’ names, and you’re definitely the bloke who gets jealous and possessive of someone that you don’t have feelings for, and it’s a completely normal thing for you to want to tell me everything about your other friends.”

Crowley glared at her and went to set his plate down on the small table in the main room (it served two purposes: eating meals and storing mail that he never read). He collapsed into his chair and started eating, not even so much as glancing up when Anathema sat down across from him. She was staring at him with that same pitying expression on her face, and Crowley was quickly getting very annoyed by it.

“Listen,” he finally snapped, putting his fork down on the table with a slam. “Eli is my friend, okay? He’s an interesting person, and he has good insights on things, and he’s funny and nice to be around. And yes, he’s-” Crowley flapped his hand around, searching for a word that was more platonic than _beautiful_ “-objectively attractive, but romance isn’t my thing. I don’t do that, which you are fucking well aware of. So, I’m happy that Eli’s found someone. The someone he’s with is a bit of a pretentious prick, but I hope that they’re happy together. It doesn’t matter to me if he’s single or not because I’m _not interested in dating him_.”

If lies could start fires, the whole block would’ve been burning. Crowley was trying very hard to believe the things that he’d just said, but the unfortunate thing about the truth is that it doesn’t change regardless of how much you might wish it would. So, it wasn’t that Crowley was trying to lie. He was just trying in vain to change the truth.

He’d been getting coffee with Eli once a week for the past six or so weeks, and he’d spent a good portion of that time convincing himself that he was fine being platonic with Eli. He’d gotten there eventually, and he’d been doing a bit better at keeping himself from blushing and ignoring the softness in Eli’s eyes, but then The Boyfriend had happened, and the bricks Crowley had laid on his emotional walls were smashed to dust.

Crowley had found out about Eli’s new romantic attachment when Eli had picked up his phone to show Crowley a rare book that he’d found. On Eli’s lock screen was a terribly familiar shock of green hair and toothy grin, and Crowley’s blood had turned to ice. He hadn’t had the self-control to mask the involuntary tightening of his face, and Eli had seen it.

“Ah,” Eli had said, clearing his throat unnecessarily. “Yes, I meant to tell you about that. Do you remember Seaghan? You did his tattoo a few weeks ago.”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Good, yes. He and I… well, he took me to the museum a couple weeks back, and we decided to give things a go, and… anyway, I’ve been seeing him.”

Crowley had ignored the clenching of his heart and schooled his expression into one of mild interest as he took a sip of his double espresso. “Good for you, mate.”

The tension in Eli’s soft frame had melted away, and he’d smiled. “Yes, it is, rather. He’s a good sort.”

“Seems it,” Crowley lied, and then he’d changed the subject back to whatever old book Eli had been so enthusiastic about.

Two things had happened inside of Crowley’s heart as a result of this revelation. There had been a strange sort of relief, first, because he knew that as long as Eli was tied down to someone else, he wouldn’t have to worry about any impromptu romantic advances. This feeling was quickly overridden by another, though: jealousy. Crowley had never really been jealous before Eli. He’d never let himself care about anyone like he cared about Eli, and the pain of knowing that he’d lost a race he had been trying very hard not to run was inexplicably debilitating.

So, Crowley had dealt with these things in the same way he always did. He locked his heart in a metaphorical steel-sided box, shoved all of his renegade emotions in there with it, and chucked the key into the deepest part of the pit that had opened in his gut. Then, he’d gone out, filled that gaping pit with alcohol, and had wound up kissing a stranger in the backseat of their car. He’d stopped, of course, before anything more than his-tongue-not-being-in-his-own-mouth had happened, and then he’d gone home alone. In the morning, he’d strengthened his anti-romantic resolve, had checked the lock on the box around his heart, and had done his very best to be happy for Eli.

Now, though, under the scrutiny of Anathema’s skeptical gaze, Crowley felt his heart give a very enthusiastic attempt at escape. He didn’t let it, though. With a final glare in her direction, Crowley returned his attention to his plate of food and took a few too-large bites of pasta to keep his mouth occupied.

“You’re really never going to want to be loved?” Anathema’s voice was gentle, gentler than it had really ever been. Crowley stopped shoveling pasta into his mouth and looked at her. To his shock, when his green eyes came to rest on her brown ones, there was a film of tears threatening to spill over her cheeks.

“I _am_ loved,” Crowley said. “_You_ love me, even if you have a weird way of showing it sometimes. My parents - well, they arguably love me. And Eli cares about me. He cares what happens to me, and that’s… that’s enough.”

“I think we both know that it isn’t.”

Neither of them said anything more about it. Crowley didn’t reply to Anathema’s final comment because she was so right that it was impossible for him to dispute it, but he was really making an effort to convince himself that she was wrong.

They finished the evening by binge-watching a police procedural. As usual, Anathema had brought wine (and when Crowley had complained about the poor quality, she’d said that she was a “bloody fucking doctoral student, Tony, I’m not made of money”), and they shared the bottle over the course of the night. They sat next to one another on the sofa, Crowley sprawled out bonelessly on every inch of space that his best friend wasn’t occupying. She kept teasing him, pushing his legs around or scooching closer so that he’d be forced to move his arm out of the way, and in the ensuing laughter (on Anathema’s part) and faux-glaring (on Crowley’s), the conversation over dinner was mostly forgotten. Eventually, Crowley made his way to bed, leaving Anathema asleep on his sofa.  
When he woke up, she was gone. She’d left a note on his coffee table:

_I love you, you stupid bastard. Get some more coffee - there’s some in the pot, but now you’re out (sorry). Also, I ate your last banana (also sorry?). See you later. -An_

Grumbling about thieving best friends, Crowley poured himself a cup of slightly-cold coffee and made a grocery list, on which he included _“a knife with which to threaten An into not stealing my food anymore”_ purely out of spite.

*********

When Eli had asked if he could bring Seaghan to coffee, Crowley should have said no. But he didn’t, and so he was sitting across the table from the couple, watching them flirt and trying very hard to keep their linked hands out of his line of sight.

“So,” Seaghan was saying, smiling his stupidly charming smile at Crowley, gaze flicking occasionally back to Eli, “he and I started talking about Dostoevsky, and before we knew it, hours had gone by and we hadn’t moved.”

“It’s so lovely to have someone with whom I have things in common,” Eli said, pressing a chaste kiss to Seaghan’s cheek. Crowley tried not to be offended by that, which went about as well as his attempts to talk literature with Eli would have gone (which is to say, _not well_).

So he pasted on a fake half-smile and said, “Mmm,” before taking a too-long drink of his iced coffee.

“Hey, Crowley, I saw that drawing that you did of Eli. It’s really excellent - you’ve got quite an eye.”

Something behind Crowley’s eyes flashed red. He’d nearly forgotten that he’d given Eli a drawing; some part of him had honestly assumed that Eli had probably gotten rid of it shortly after Crowley gave it to him. But no, that had obviously not happened. He’d kept the blasted thing, and he’d showed it to his art-museum-curator of a boyfriend, and that boyfriend had seen fit to bring it up.

Crowley knew that he shouldn’t have felt protective of his drawing. He never felt protective of his art, really, and Seaghan literally had proof of that hidden beneath his shirt. As long as people didn’t try to steal from him or rip off his style, Crowley was always willing to let others see it, but for some reason, the thought of Seaghan having looked at and critiqued his drawing of Eli was a step too far. It felt… well, it felt _private_ somehow. He’d seen Eli and fallen very quickly into infatuation with him - not love, it wasn’t love because it couldn’t have been, not for Crowley - and his drawing had reflected that. Seaghan seeing it just felt inexplicably wrong, and Crowley’s skin crawled at the thought of it.

“I thought it was,” Crowley snapped after a moment, venom dripping from his words. “_So_ very glad that you agree.”

From across the table, Eli smiled at him, and Crowley felt like throwing up.

“I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen, really,” Eli said. “Better than some of the things in the National Gallery.”

Seaghan guffawed, and Crowley glared at him. “It’s excellent, I’ll give you that. But better than Monet?”

_Of course he likes the bloody Impressionists,_ Crowley snarled in his head (Crowley himself also liked the Impressionists, but this fact was irrelevant to his current jealousy-fueled internal tirade)._ I could practically smell the pretentious motherfucking attitude. This bastard, I swear-_

Crowley’s thoughts were interrupted by Eli’s voice saying, “Well, I like Crowley’s realism quite a lot. I know you’re fond of Monet and Van Gogh, my dear, but I’d prefer to see more of the type of thing that Crowley does.”

The words were out of Crowley’s mouth before he’d even thought about saying them. “I’ve got more sketches in my shop if you’d like to see them.” He had a brief moment of fleeting satisfaction at the look of shock on Seaghan’s handsome face before he realized what he’d done and went a very alarming shade of white. “I mean- look, there’s no pressure, I didn’t mean to suggest that you’d have an interest-”

“Oh, we have an interest,” Seaghan said cooly, and his grip on Eli’s hand visibly tightened. “Do you have time now?”

“Sure.” Crowley’s mouth had gone as rough and dry as if he’d been chewing on handfuls of sand for days and hadn’t been given so much as a drop of water. “Come on with me next door. I’ll need a sec to grab my sketchbooks.”

Hand in hand, Seaghan and Eli followed Crowley into his shop. Crowley practically ran up the stairs to his flat, leaving the two of them alone downstairs.

“Shit,” he said, running his hands through his hair and pulling at it, hard. “Shit, shit, shitshitshitshit.” He hadn’t meant to do this. He hadn’t wanted to show any of his other work to Seaghan The Bloody Pretentious Art Bloke, but something about the combination of Seaghan’s criticism and Eli’s unwavering support had made his brain short-circuit, and so here he was. Crowley shuffled through the stacks of filled sketchbooks on his desk, flipping through them to make sure that he didn’t pull anything incriminating (like, for instance, a detailed study of Eli’s eyes or hands or hair).

After a couple of minutes, he had four sketchbooks on his bed and two on his desk. Green, blue, black, and grey were safe. Red and purple had… well, they were about as safe as unsealed containers of nuclear waste.

Sketchbooks under his arm, Crowley trotted back down the stairs and was greeted by the massively unpleasant sight of Seaghan’s mouth sealed over Eli’s.

“Oka-_oh_,” Crowley spluttered. Eli and Seaghan sprang apart like Crowley had run a live wire between their lips. “Sorry, I should’ve… I dunno, knocked?”

“You’re fine, mate. We should’ve waited ‘til we got somewhere more private.” In that moment, the list of things that Crowley hated most in the world had one item on it, and that item was Seaghan’s fucking grin. The bastard was standing with his hand on Eli’s arm, and he didn’t even have the decency to look halfway ashamed.

For his part, Eli had gone very red in the cheeks and wiped his mouth on the cuff of his jacket. He looked a bit like a child who’d gotten caught with his hand in the biscuit tin, and that at least brought Crowley a small measure of comfort.

Crowley plunked the sketchbooks down onto his consulting table. “Right, so the green and blue are the realism-type sketches that you like, Eli, and the black and grey are tat design ideas.”

Eli tugged Seaghan over to the table, reaching first for the blue book and turning its pages with delicate touches. He would whisper comments to his boyfriend every so often, and Seaghan would usually reply with grunts or eyerolls or, on a few notable occasions, mild criticisms.

Once, Eli looked up from the sketches and caught Crowley’s eye. “This one is incredible. You’ve captured their emotions perfectly.”

The sketch that Eli was referring to was (because the Powers That Be had something against Crowley, evidently) one he’d done a year or so back of a young couple walking through St. James’s Park. They couldn’t have been older than Crowley was when he’d drawn them. The bloke was on the taller side, and he had wavy chestnut-colored hair that kept falling in his eyes when he craned his neck to look at his girlfriend. She was quite a lot shorter than he was, and she had long blonde hair that was tied neatly into a pair of braids. Crowley had been watching them for a while, studying their movements, and he found that they moved together like they’d been built for it. The boy shortened his strides and his girlfriend lengthened hers, and they swung their hands together in the same rhythm, and they kept sneaking glances at each other when they thought the other wasn’t looking. None of it looked planned or intentional. It all looked natural, and Crowley had thought it was beautiful. He’d been jealous of them even as he sketched the love on their faces, and after he finished it, he never went back to look at it again.

It made perfect sense that Eli loved it. He was the type of person, Crowley was quickly learning, who had been given the innate ability to love other people with around five hundred times the amount of passion as any ordinary person. In their conversations over coffee, Eli would often bring up his most interesting customers, and he’d tell Crowley all about their lives. He loved loving people. It was like he’d been created with no other purpose than to go around loving, which was why Crowley found it exceptionally painful to be around him at times. Eli was, essentially, capable of exactly that which Crowley failed to do.

But Crowley didn’t say any of this to Eli. He wouldn’t have dared even if they’d been alone, but Seaghan’s presence made him even more reserved than usual. Instead of telling the story of the couple in the sketch, Crowley just shrugged and said, “Thanks. It’s just a little study, really. Not a big deal.”

“I like it.” Eli bent once more over the sketchbook, and Crowley muttered another thank-you under his breath.

When Seaghan got bored of the realism, he dropped Eli’s hand and began flipping through the pages of the black sketchbook. Where Eli treated the books like precious things, Seaghan moved with small, sharp movements that made Crowley afraid of potential ripped pages and destroyed ideas. Luckily, this didn’t happen. Seaghan worked his way through the black book and then the grey one, and it was only after he’d looked at both that he flipped them shut and moved his gaze up to Crowley.

“You’ve got some serious imagination. It’s really brilliant - that’s why I came to you. You’ve got a way with lines and colors, mate, and I really respect you for it.” This time, Seaghan’s smile seemed a bit less sharp, so Crowley returned it.

“Thanks, Seaghan.”

Seaghan nodded to him before focusing his attention on Eli. “Hey, babe, I’ve got to get to work. I’ll see you tonight?”

“Hmm?” Eli asked, still completely immersed in Crowley’s sketches.

“Babe,” Seaghan said again, this time with a bit more emphasis (Crowley pretended that this didn’t feel like someone was driving a knife into his chest). “I have to go, but I’ll see you for dinner?”

“Oh, yes.” And then Eli leaned in and brushed a quick kiss across Seaghan’s lips, pulling away with a shy sort of smile toying at the corners of his mouth. He looked beautiful, and Crowley hated it. “See you later. Good luck at work!”

“Bye, Crowley,” Seaghan said on his way out the door. “Take care of my bloke, will you?”

Crowley flinched. “Yeah, sure.”

Eli continued to leaf though Crowley’s work for quite some time. A young-ish woman came in for a consultation, so Crowley cleared a space at the table and talked her through her ideas (something floral patterned with words from Jane Austen incorporated somewhere), and he eventually made her an appointment and sent her on her way. When she’d gone, Crowley sauntered back over to the table and sat down across from Eli, one eyebrow raised impatiently.

He had to clear his throat four times before Eli so much as glanced up at him.

“Sorry,” Eli said immediately. “Should I go?”

“Nah. Just curious as to why you’re so interested, that’s all.”

Lines of concentration crinkled across Eli’s forehead again. “I suppose I’m just trying to figure out what it is about these drawings that’s so different.”

“They’re just sketches,” Crowley said. “Nothing different.”

“No, there’s something.” Eli was insistent, and he bent closer to the page as though it would help him see inside the lines of graphite for whatever it was that he was missing. “It’s like… I don’t know, it’s like I’m not looking at the right thing. Like the lines are almost perfect, but not quite.”

“What?” That wasn't exactly the sort of thing that artists ever really wanted to hear.

“No, not like that. I love them, really - it’s just that I can’t quite see exactly what there is about them that makes me love them so much.”

Silently, Crowley smiled. He knew exactly what Eli was seeing because he saw it himself.

“I don’t think you’re noticing any of what there is,” Crowley said slowly, tracing a long finger along the curved neck of the duck that was staring up at him from the page. “I think you’re seeing what there isn’t.”

Eli’s brow uncrinkled slightly. “So what isn’t there?”

“Anything fake,” Crowley said. “I only draw things as I see them. I don’t try to smooth out lines that are rough, and I don’t shy away from blemishes in skin or frizzy pieces of hair. I don’t want to make things look ‘right’ because things never really are.”

“You draw what other people avoid,” Eli breathed. “Yeah, that’s… that’s it, I think.”

“You like it.” It wasn’t a question because it didn’t have to be. Crowley already knew.

He was rewarded with a gentle smile and a flash of extra warmth in Eli’s dark eyes. “I do. Very much.”

“Let me know what you want me to draw for you, then.”

Typically speaking, the only things that Crowley did by request were tattoos, and even those he did mostly by himself. But Eli liked his sketches, and so Crowley would make another one for him.  
Something that Eli wanted. Something good.

“Really?” The hope in Eli’s voice made Crowley’s heart pound against the sides of the box in which he’d trapped it. Over the course of the time he’d spent with Eli and Seaghan, most of the pesky emotions that Crowley had locked away had managed to slip out through the cracks. His heart was still stuck, though, caged behind walls of metal and fortified with code-protected padlocks. But it didn’t want to be there, so it was protesting.

And so the left side of Crowley’s mouth drew upwards into a half-smile, and Crowley said, “Anything you want.”

“Let me think about it. I really appreciate the offer, Crowley.” Eli hesitated for a moment, fidgeting. He wasn’t sure what to do, and Crowley could tell. Finally, he asked, “Can I pay you?”

“No,” Crowley said quickly. “You don’t need to- I mean, my friends don’t pay.”

Eli beamed at him. “Thank you. I’ll think of something, and when I do, I’ll let you know.”

“Okay.”

When Eli had gone, Crowley gathered up his sketchbooks and flipped the sign on the door to _“Closed.”_ He ate a quiet dinner in front of the telly, half-mindedly watching a baking program and certainly not thinking about Eli and Seaghan sitting at a restaurant somewhere. He wasn’t thinking of Seaghan making Eli laugh, and he wasn’t thinking of Eli reaching for Seaghan’s hand or pressing kisses to Seaghan’s lips. It got frustrating, really, all of the not-thinking he was doing, so he stopped himself by turning off the telly and climbing into bed.

He knew that he shouldn’t be thinking about Eli in this way any more. Eli had someone else, and while Seaghan had a bit of an ego and a too-charming grin, he seemed harmless enough. Eli was taken, and even if he was single, Crowley still wouldn’t make a move. He needed to get over himself, needed to put his heart back in check and go back to a time before Eli Fell had walked up to him in the park. He needed to lose himself in his work, and he needed to keep Eli at arm’s length.

So, at a quarter past midnight on a random Thursday at the end of February, Anthony Crowley sent a message to the man he was trying very hard not to love.

_ Sorry to do this to you, but I’m going to have to cancel our coffee next week. Something’s come up, and I’ll be away. If you think of something that you’d like me to draw for you, let me know. Sorry again._

It hurt him a bit to press send, but he told himself that it was for the best. A bit of a break, a little space to breathe, and he could reset himself. Get back to normal, back to the man he used to be. He could be free from the stupidity of romantic feelings once more, and that would make everything okay.


	6. Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley and Anathema go to a dinner for a certain bright-haired bloke, and Crowley has many thoughts about many things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, y'all! 
> 
> So, a couple things to note about this chapter: 
> 
> Crowley's feelings are immensely complicated. I wish that I could simplify them, but they're feelings, so I can't. That's why there's a lot of exploration of them here. 
> 
> Also, yes, I *know* that I've created a tangled web of a thing here. I (ironically) actually hate love triangles, but I needed a solid external conflict (i.e. one that isn't mental or emotional inside of Crowley's head), and this was the best/worst way I could think to do one. Sorry if it's not your thing - I promise that it's not mine either! I also promise that there will be no infidelity or passionate cheating or whatever, because I personally think that that's a super bad way to start a relationship. 
> 
> BIG WARNING HERE: this chapter contains references to homophobic family members. I usually try to avoid this, but as someone I love very much pointed out to me recently, dealing with homophobic relatives is a thing that most LGBT+ people experience at some point in time (there are people I haven't come out to and never plan to come out to for this very reason), and so I thought that it should be represented. 
> 
> In regards to the above point: this chapter also contains a MASSIVELY supportive mother because I had to bring in some goodness. 
> 
> Eli doesn't do a whole lot in relation to Crowley in this chapter because it's a lot of Crowley being introspective and such, but I swear on Neil Gaiman's entire collected works that THERE WILL BE FLUFF AND HAPPINESS AND LOVE IN THIS FIC OKAY? We're just not there yet. Also, heads up for language in this chapter (duh. That's a given, really.) 
> 
> This was a really long note, but as always, I appreciate you all immensely, and if you feel inclined to leave a comment, please please do! xx

The blazer was made of scratchy grey wool, and it hung off of Crowley’s slim frame like a piece of elephant skin. Looking at himself in his bathroom mirror, Crowley found that he didn’t really like what he saw. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d worn a button-down, tie, slacks, and a blazer for _anything_, but here he was, doing it to support his friend’s boyfriend.

“I hate formalwear,” Crowley growled. From the bed behind him, Anathema giggled.

“Where did you even find that thing?”

“Thrift shop.” He tried to tug at the sleeves, but it didn’t help at all, so he leaned forward and laid his head against the mirror with a groan. “An, please tell me why I agreed to go to this.”

“Because Seaghan invited you.”

“Yes, I know,” Crowley said petulantly. “But why did I say _yes_?”

Anathema got up from the bed and leaned against the doorway. She had found a midnight-blue dress that flattered her figure, and she’d pinned up her dark curls into an artful pile on the top of her head. She’d even done her makeup, which was not an ordinary thing. When she’d arrived, Crowley had told her honestly that she looked beautiful, and she’d blushed furiously, given him a kiss on the cheek, and then turned her attention to helping him get dressed.

Now, though, she was smirking at him. “You said yes because you want to make Eli happy, and you know that one way you can do that is by being nice to Seaghan.”

In contrast to Anathema, Crowley looked like shit. He’d flattened his unruly dark hair down in an attempt to look respectable, but with the close-shaven sides of his head, it looked more like a bad toupee than anything else. The only button-down he’d had in his closet was a white one which, upon closer inspection, had a coffee stain on the right side of the chest. Crowley wasn’t the sort of bloke who owned any ties, so he’d had to ask Anathema to steal one from her boyfriend (apparently techy-types like Newt used ties for silly purposes like “making good impressions on clients” and “meetings with bosses”). The tie was really the only thing that Crowley was wearing that looked at all decent; the trousers he’d bought were strangely both too short and too baggy, and the blazer was nothing short of horrible.

“I don’t want to go to this,” Crowley said, unsticking his forehead from the mirror. “I look stupid.”

His best friend just grinned at him. “Yeah, but Newt is definitely closer to your size than anything you’re wearing at the moment, so we can improve… well, we can improve _all of this_ considerably if we go raid his closet.”

“We don’t have time.”

Anathema rolled her eyes, grabbing him by the elbow as she pulled him out the door and down the stairs. “Then we’ll be late.”

“An, seriously, this is a nice-ass dinner at a nice-ass restaurant full of posh people who think being on time is tardy. We _can’t_ be late.”

With a heavily put-upon-sounding sigh, Anathema tossed him the keys to her car. “Fine. You drive, then - you’re a bloody speed demon who doesn’t give two shits about traffic laws, so we should be alright.”

Smirking, Crowley flung open the driver’s side door and had turned the car on and put it into gear before Anathema had even gotten around to buckling her seatbelt. “Direct me,” he said, and stepped on the gas pedal.

Forty minutes later, Crowley walked into a restaurant that he’d driven by but never been inside of wearing a borrowed suit, one of his sweaty hands laced with Anathema’s. They held hands all the time (which had only begun to happen because they’d established that their relationship would always be platonic - neither was attracted to the other, so it worked - and because Anathema had deemed Crowley to be touch-starved), so it didn’t feel odd to either of them to do so now.

Crowley spotted Eli’s light curls from the moment they walked into the dining room. Beside him, Anathema gave his hand a reassuring squeeze and smiled up at him. “Let’s do this thing, Tony.”

“Ngh,” Crowley said, but he smiled a bit at her anyway.

They hadn’t even made it over to the table when they were accosted by a newly-red-haired Seaghan, his typical toothy grin stuck onto his face. “Hey! Really glad you could make it, mate.”

“Happy to be here,” Crowley said, doing his best to believe it. He was actually extremely uncomfortable with the poshness of the restaurant; the gilded walls and pristine white linens were unfamiliar and cold, and he was pretty desperate to get back home. “Happy birthday.”

Still grinning, Seaghan accepted the envelope that Crowley had pulled out of his inside jacket pocket. “Thanks, Crowley. Means a lot.” His gaze slid over to Anathema, and he stuck his hand out in greeting. “You must be An - I’m Seaghan Thomas.”

“Nice to meet you,” Anathema said, giving Seaghan a grin that was nearly as wide as his own and using her free hand to shake his. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Seaghan threw his head back and laughed, drawing the attention of his boyfriend, who began to make his way over to say hello. “All good things, I hope?”

“Of course.” This wasn’t entirely true. Anathema had certainly heard a great many things about Seaghan that couldn’t be considered positive, but these things had mostly been said toward the beginning of Eli’s relationship. More accurately, they’d been said before Crowley realized that he actually didn’t mind Seaghan at all.

Crowley’s initial attempts to distance himself from Eli hadn’t gone over well at all. He’d made half-assed excuses for the first few weeks, saying that he’d come down with a cold or was going to visit his parents, but Eli hadn’t been deterred. When he’d said he felt sick, Eli had showed up at the shop with a cup of tea that contained more honey than water and a can of soup, and he’d made Crowley let him into the flat so that he could make him the soup. Crowley had faked a mild illness throughout the whole ordeal, and the only way that he got Eli to leave was by finishing two bowls of soup and saying that he felt tired and was going to bed. The next week, Eli had dropped by the day before Crowley had said he was going to visit his parents (he wasn’t, and he’d had no intention of ever doing so) to say goodbye. Crowley had thought that putting distance between himself and Eli would help things, but it hadn’t worked because Eli was an annoyingly good friend, and so he’d given up.

Unfortunately, giving up had entailed seeing a lot more of Seaghan than he would have preferred. Eli would drop by the shop sometimes, his arm linked through Seaghan’s, and the three of them would talk for a while if Crowley didn’t have a consultation or an appointment. On some days after he’d closed the shop, Crowley would walk over to The Quill and Ink, and he’d hide himself between the shelves before he was discovered by the proprietor or the proprietor’s neon-haired partner. Most of the time, Seaghan worked during Crowley and Eli’s coffee meetings, but sometimes he didn’t, and on those days, he came along. Crowley hated it, at first. He hated watching Eli watch Seaghan, hated seeing pink blushes tinge Eli’s cheeks, hated watching Eli take Seaghan’s hand or press light kisses to Seaghan’s lips. It was torture for the first month or so, and Crowley tended to resolve his emotional turmoil by drinking, or by dancing and kissing strangers, or (when he was feeling strong enough to stay sober) drawing.

One day, in spite of everything, Crowley realized that had actually begun to like Seaghan. Eli was helping a customer, and Seaghan had cornered Crowley and was talking excitedly about a new piece in the National Gallery’s temporary exhibit. Crowley had grunted at him and pretended not to be interested, but eventually Seaghan’s enthusiasm had rubbed off on him a bit, and before he knew it, he was talking with Seaghan about their mutual love for Monet. This turned into a conversation about music taste, and Crowley found himself giving Seaghan one of his carefully-structured-but-actually-_happy_ smiles as they talked about the best rock guitarists of all time. When Eli had finished making his sale, he walked over to where Crowley and Seaghan were sitting slumped against a pair of bookshelves, swapping stories of the first time they’d listened to Queen.

From there, things got a little easier. Seaghan was funny, and he had a very disarming smile and easy-going personality, and he always seemed ready to do whatever Eli asked of him. He was, frankly, a very good boyfriend, and Crowley found that part of his insides untwisted when he realized this.

There was one moment in particular that changed things for Crowley. The three of them had been sitting in Crowley’s shop, and Seaghan had done something stupid enough to make Eli dissolve into peals of body-shaking laughter. It hit Crowley like a lorry: Seaghan was making Eli happy in a way that Crowley never could.

This new awareness drove extra knives through certain parts of Crowley’s mangled emotions and stitched together others. On the one hand, Crowley hated believing that it was in Eli’s best interest to be with Seaghan. He hated understanding that Eli was better off with someone _not_ named Anthony Crowley. That part killed him a little, and his body ached with the sound of Eli’s laughter. But the other part, the part that got mended, was the part that Crowley wanted to believe. The anti-romantic-attachment portion of Crowley’s brain celebrated at this realization because it meant that Crowley wouldn’t have to worry anymore. Of course he wanted Eli to be safe, and now Eli was. Of course he wanted Eli to be happy, and now Eli was. There wasn’t a need for any more of that pining nonsense that his heart had been getting up to.

There was still a certain amount of jealousy that never went away, of course, and it flared up whenever Eli looked at Seaghan like he’d hung the moon, but Crowley hated it. So, he picked up the squished remains of his softest feelings and tucked them into a dark and forgotten corner of his soul. He didn’t want to think about them, so he did his best not to.

Still, though, something inside of Crowley twinged a bit when Eli crossed the dining room, slid his hand into Seaghan’s, and said, “Hello, Crowley! Seaghan told me he’d invited you, but I didn’t- it doesn’t matter. I’m just happy to see you here.”

“Mmm,” Crowley said, and Anathema rolled her eyes at him.

“Allow me to translate,” Anathema said with a laugh. “‘Mmm’ is Crowley for ‘Yes, I’m really happy to be here, too! How are you doing?’”

Eli giggled. “I think I’m starting to learn Crowley’s language, but the translation is much appreciated all the same. I’m Eli, by the way - I take it that you’re the infamous An?”

“Got it in one.”

Someone called Seaghan’s name, which caused him to say a quick “be back in a minute” and scurry off to talk to whomever had summoned him. Chuckling lightly, Eli turned his attention to striking up a conversation with Anathema. One of the worst things about being friends with Anathema was that she was always just so _good_ with people, which was not a skill that anyone had ever accused Crowley of possessing. He was awkward where she was smooth, harsh where she was kind, and wordless where she knew the right words to say. She was similar to Eli in this respect, really, and so Crowley didn’t even bother to keep pace with their conversation. He stood off to the side, shifting both his weight and his eyes and trying not to draw attention to himself.

Crowley had just snagged a flute of champagne off of a passing server’s tray and was priding himself on his ability to become invisible in a room full of people when there was a gentle tap on his shoulder. He spun around and found himself looking down at the blue eyes and wide smile of a well-dressed woman.

“Hello, dear! I’m Maggie, Seaghan’s mum.” Now that she’d said it, Crowley could see the resemblance. It was the smile, mostly; her son had evidently gotten it from her.

“Hey,” Crowley said. “I’m Crowley. I did Seaghan’s tattoo a few months back, and I’m friends with his boyfriend.”

Maggie gasped and clapped her hands together. “Oh, that tattoo is lovely! Has he talked you into giving him another one yet? He’d said that he was going to think about it.”

“Not yet,” Crowley replied, unable to stop himself from smiling slightly back at her, “but I’d be happy to do one whenever he asks.”

“He’ll be happy to know that, I’m sure,” Maggie said. “So, Crowley! That lovely young lady in the blue dress - girlfriend?”

Crowley choked on the sip of champagne he’d just taken. “What? No, no, definitely not. She’s just my best friend, I’ve known her for years.”

“Never anything more?”

_Bit pushy, this one,_ Crowley thought with a mental grimace. “No,” he said. “Not anything more. She’s got a boyfriend, and I’ve got… well, I do my own thing.”

Maggie’s already round face got impossibly softer, and she leaned forward and put her hand gently on Crowley’s arm. “Oh, I see. You like blokes, then?”

“_No_,” Crowley said reflexively, immediately thinking better of it when he saw Maggie’s smile falter for a moment. “I mean- yeah, I suppose I do go in for blokes sometimes, I haven’t got anything against that at all - I like women, too, though - but that’s not my reason for not dating An. She’s just… I dunno, she’s like my sister. Wouldn’t… wouldn’t work.” He was nervous, and so he was blabbering, and Maggie seemed to pick up on this. The hand on Crowley’s arm slid up to his shoulder, and then Crowley found himself suddenly and unexpectedly engulfed in a hug.

When Maggie pulled away, Crowley didn’t say anything. He just stood there stiffly, trying to figure out what had possessed this strange woman to hug him in a crowded room for no reason at all. It was, Crowley was quickly discovering, not an easy question to ask out loud without sounding intolerably rude.

Luckily, he was spared having to ask because Maggie offered him an explanation. “Sorry. I’ve just gotten in the habit of hugging folks who’re in the same community as my boy - the LGBT, isn’t that right? - because I’ve found that there’s a bit of a lack of parental support all around.” At Crowley’s tongue-tied lack of response, she went faintly pink and said, “Sorry, again. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“You didn’t,” Crowley said hurriedly. He took another sip of champagne (because his mouth had suddenly gone very dry with emotions that he was not fond of thinking about) and asked a question he’d never had the chance to ask anyone before. “How are you… why are you so okay with it? Seaghan dating men, I mean.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? He’s my son, and I love him. It’s just a mum thing.”

“Right.” The dryness in his mouth hadn’t faded in the slightest. “I, er, don’t think my mum would agree.”

He didn’t understand why he’d said that. His problems with his parents was a topic that Crowley didn’t broach with anyone, _ever_ \- even Anathema didn’t know much past the basic premise that his mother disapproved heavily of his attraction to men - and yet here he was, talking to the mother of a man he’d only recently befriended about precisely that issue. A very large part of Crowley was screaming at him to make up an excuse and bolt, to run from this whole situation and get as far from Seaghan’s loving and supportive mother as possible, but he couldn’t get his legs to move.

“I’m so sorry, dear.” Maggie sounded genuine, too, which somehow made it hurt more.

“Not your fault.”

“Well,” she said, blue eyes flashing grey for a moment, “you’re owed an apology, and from the sound of things, you’re not going to get one from your mum, so I’ll have to do.”

“Thanks,” Crowley muttered. “I’m happy Seaghan’s got a mum like you. ‘S good, being supportive. He’s lucky.”

Maggie was staring at him with a softness that was so painfully similar to the way that Eli looked at him, so Crowley dropped his gaze to his scuffed-up borrowed dress shoes. He couldn’t bring himself to look up when Maggie spoke again because he was afraid that he might say something else reckless and stupid in the face of that sort of unadulterated kindness.

“If you ever need a mum’s hug, Crowley, please don’t hesitate to ask Seaghan to reach out to me. I’d be happy to stand in.”

Crowley found himself once again at a loss for words. What was he supposed to say to that? No one had ever offered a thing like that to him before. He didn’t even know this woman, and here she was telling him to call her if he needed a hug. It didn’t compute, really. It didn’t make sense.

He was still struggling for something to say in response when Anathema reappeared at his elbow. She was smiling, but as soon as she saw the stricken look on Crowley’s face, her mouth folded into a frown.

“Hello,” she said politely, a cool edge to her voice that Crowley hadn’t ever heard before. “I’m An, Crowley’s friend.”

Maggie’s warm smile returned to her face, and she shook Anathema’s hand. “Yes, Crowley was just telling me about you! I must say, your dress is very lovely.”

“Thanks.” The sharpness was still lingering at the end of Anathema’s words, and she was casting worried glances in Crowley’s direction every few moments.

“We should probably go sit,” Crowley mumbled. “Nice to meet you, Maggie. And thanks for… just, thanks.”

“My pleasure. Enjoy the evening, you two!”

“Thank you,” Anathema said, and she tugged Crowley toward the tables that were reserved for Seaghan’s party. To his shock, though, she kept pulling him past them, ignoring his protests and keeping a vice-like grip on his arm until they had made their way out of the dining room and into a side corridor.

“What the fuck, An?”

“Are you okay?” Her voice was shaking a bit, and she sounded almost angry, so Crowley flinched backward and found himself with his back to the wall.

“I’m fine.”

“Like fuck you are,” Anathema snapped, and the emotion in her words became clearer. It wasn’t anger, it was _fear_. She was worried, really truly honest-to-Someone worried, and in spite of himself, Crowley found that one corner of his mouth twitched into a smile. “What the hell is going on?”

“I met Seaghan’s mum,” Crowley explained, trying to mold his tone into something soothing (he’d never really had to do it before, so it didn’t go very well, but at least he’d made an effort). “She asked me if you were my girlfriend, and I said no, and then she asked if I’m into blokes, and things got a bit-” he gestured vaguely “-complicated.”

Some of the tension faded from Anathema’s face as she asked, “Complicated how?”

“I accidentally let it slip that my mum isn’t supportive, and she offered to be a sort of replacement-mum if I need one. It just caught me off guard, that’s all.”

“And you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Really, you’re fine?”

“Never been better.”

Crowley allowed his best friend to fuss over the crookedness of his tie and brush a few strands of hair out of his eyes. Anathema was harsh sometimes, but apparently she turned into a mother hen when she was worried, so Crowley just sort of leaned back against the wall and let it happen.

He’d lied to her, though. He wasn’t really fine, and he realized this when he sat down next to Anathema at one of the tables. Seaghan and Eli were laughing about something, and Seaghan’s mum was holding the hand of a dark-haired man and whispering to him about something. It was picture perfect, the vision of a happy family, and that made Crowley’s heart clench involuntarily.

He could never have that. There wouldn’t ever come a day when he would sit at the same table with his parents and a man he was in a relationship with. Come to that, he wouldn’t ever have a man to _be_ in a relationship with.

Traitorously, the jealous sliver of his heart took that time to rise up in full, reminding Crowley that the only man he’d ever met who he’d even really _wanted_ to be in a relationship with was currently sitting across from him, blushing at his boyfriend and talking about their plans for the rest of the summer.

_Fuck that,_ Crowley thought. _Really. I’m fine now._

When Eli gave a short toast to Seaghan before they began the meal, Crowley thought of the happiness that a good cup of coffee brought to his life.

When Seaghan grabbed Eli by the hand and pulled him into an impromptu dance in the middle of the restaurant, Crowley thought of the rainy days that he liked to spend watching movies with Anathema.

When Eli kissed Seaghan sweetly on the lips at the end of (a rather poorly sung rendition of) “Happy Birthday,” Crowley thought of the feeling of a stranger’s lips and the sharp taste of alcohol on their tongue, and he tried to remember why that was better.

_I’m fine,_ he told himself when Anathema dropped him home. _I’m fine,_ as he stripped down to his pants and climbed beneath the covers. _I’m fine,_ as he drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, he shoved his jealousy and longing back into the pit where it belonged, and he did something that made him happy: he went to St. James’s Park and lost himself in the world for no reason other than that he loved it and that he could.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will make this okay, I swear to you. The fix-it is coming. The fluff is coming. Hold on, and please trust me. 
> 
> I love you all very very much. If you have dealt with homophobia from people who are supposed to love you, then please accept my apology on their behalf. Know that you are infinitely valuable for no reason other than that YOU EXIST, and please remember that nothing you can do or think or say can ever diminish that at all. 
> 
> You are important, okay? 
> 
> You are loved, okay? 
> 
> Please try to love yourself today, and if you can't, please let me love you today. 
> 
> Some important numbers because it never hurts to have them:  
US Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255  
Trevor Project Hotline: 1-866-488-7386  
Australian Lifeline: 13 11 14  
Australian Kids' Helpine: 1800 55 1800  
British Samaritans: 116 123  
British Shout (text only, but free): 85258  
(If you live in another country and have another hotline number that I should list here, let me know in the comments or on Tumblr!)


	7. Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley's parents come to town and chaos ensues. 
> 
> This first part chapter is really rough, but the latter part is the first step in the direction of the "this-story-ends-happy-I-swear" phase of things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gonna keep this short and sweet. This chapter was tough to write, so I'd imagine it'll be tough to read. I promise things will only get better from here. I'm not sure how I feel about the pace of this whole thing, really, so let me know if I should go back and fix it. 
> 
> Warnings for homophobia and family-related trauma as well as my usual language. 
> 
> Thanks for hanging in there, friends! We're not out of the darkness, but at least now there's some light.

They’d told him that they were going to come into the city for a visit, but he’d made a note in his calendar for the wrong day. So, Crowley was extremely shaken up when he looked out of the front window of his shop and saw his mum and dad walking toward the door.

“Shit,” he said, and he plastered on a fake smile as they walked into the shop. “Hi, Mum! Hey, Dad.”

“You don’t look like you were expecting us,” his mum said, her voice as frigid as it typically was when she spoke to him nowadays.

_Right,_ Crowley thought bitterly. _No “Hello, Anthony! How are you?” Haven’t seen them in six bloody months, and she can’t even be bothered to say hello before laying into me._

Still smiling half-heartedly, Crowley stood up from the front desk and wrapped his mum and dad in a hug. His dad returned it with an enthusiastic squeeze, and he even managed to get a brief back rub out of his mum before he pulled away.

“I must’ve put the wrong date in my calendar. Thought I’d be seeing you tomorrow.” There was something in his calendar for the day, though, Crowley was sure of it. He had two appointments in the afternoon, but it was mid-morning, so he’d have a little time to spend with his parents before then.

“It’s okay, Anthony.” His dad was the voice of reason in every situation, and just hearing him speak was something of a comfort to Crowley. “Do you have time to see us today?”

“He’ll bloody well make time,” snapped Crowley’s mum. “We didn’t make the drive in here not to see him.”

“It’s a thirty minute drive, dear. We can make it again tomorrow if we need to.”

“I have time,” Crowley interrupted before they could get into an argument over him (again). “I’ve got a couple tattoos to do this afternoon, but I think my morning’s free.”

Almost as soon as the words left his mouth, Crowley realized what had been in his calendar. Coffee with Eli. Today was Saturday, and he was supposed to be getting coffee with Eli _right now_. 

Crowley realized this, unfortunately, because Eli was already halfway across the street, his ever-present soft grin turning into a brighter one when he saw Crowley looking. Panicked, Crowley made a vain attempt to wave him off, desperate to avoid having to introduce Eli to his mum. Eli misinterpreted Crowley’s dismissal as a friendly wave, which he returned enthusiastically before pulling open the door to Crowley’s shop.

“Good morning! Coffee, yes?” Eli’s lilting high tenor rang through the room, and Crowley winced as his parents turned to greet his friend.

Crowley watched in horror as his mum gave Eli a once-over. He could practically see the gears turning in her head, and he could do nothing but watch as she made wild assumptions about Eli’s sexuality based on the way he was dressed and the manner in which he was standing (which were correct assumptions, but that wasn’t the point). These assumptions were only confirmed when her eyes came to rest on the rainbow-flag-shaped pin on Eli’s collar.

With a huff, she wheeled around, dark eyes flashing at her son, mouth already open and talking before Crowley had a chance to say anything in his or Eli’s defense.

“This your boyfriend, then?”

“No, Mum,” Crowley said hurriedly, ignoring the way that Eli’s face went very red (he’d apparently grasped the gist of the situation he’d walked in on). “He’s just a friend, I sw-”

“What did we tell you about this?”

“You told me that you didn’t approve, but that you lov-”

“Shut up, Anthony,” she snapped, and Crowley’s father flinched and reached for her hand, which she batted away. “You thought you could keep this from us? You thought you could have a boyfriend and we wouldn’t find out about it? You thought you could carry on like this and we’d never have to know?”

“Mum,” Crowley began, pleading, at the same time as Eli said, “I think there’s been some sort of a misunderstanding-”

The sound of Eli’s voice sent Crowley’s mum into a full rage, and the muscles in her jaw clenched as she glared daggers in Eli’s direction. “This is a conversation between myself, my husband, and my son. You have nothing to do with it.”

Eli looked like he’d been hit in the stomach, and Crowley felt like melting into the floor.

“Charlotte,” Crowley’s father said soothingly, “Listen to Anthony, please. He says that this young man isn’t his boyfriend, give him a chance to explain-”

“He knows what he’s done. Friend or boyfriend, I don’t care.” Crowley’s mum’s chest was heaving, anger coloring her face in blotches of red and white. “He knows what I said when he first told us. Don’t get involved if you want to come home. Don’t do-” she gestured at Eli “-that.”

“Mum,” Crowley started again, all color draining from his face as the words she’d said began to sink in. “Please, please listen to me. Please at least look at me.”

She didn’t.

“Please, Mum.”

Crowley watched as his mother took a few deep breaths, straightened her blouse, and turned her back to him. “You know how to fix this, Anthony.” And then she walked out the door, not even glancing back at the broken pieces of her son.

“Dad,” Crowley whispered, wrenching his gaze away from the closing door and moving forward, grabbing his father’s hand in an unrelenting, desperate grip. “Stay, please. Let me talk to you.”

His dad’s eyes were sadder than Crowley had ever seen them before. People always said that he looked like his dad, and he knew that it was the eyes that did it. So it killed him, then, to see the same green eyes that he saw in the mirror every morning looking at him like that. The longer Crowley stared at his father, the clearer the meaning of that look became. It wasn’t just sadness. It wasn’t loss or even sympathy.

It was grief. Mourning.

“Anthony, I…” His father dropped his eyes to the floor. “I love you, but… I have to go. She’ll never forgive me if I stay. I- I’ll call you tonight, alright? I’m sorry.”

And then he wrenched his wrist out of Crowley’s grasp and left, shoulders shaking a bit with tears that he refused to let Crowley see.

It was quiet for a few too-long moments, and to Crowley’s utter shock, the world kept on turning. The sunlight still streamed in through the windows, people still walked by on the street, and the honking of car horns was just the same as it always was. He didn’t know what to do or where to go, and he especially didn’t understand how to deal with the fact that his mother had just walked out of his life. The thing that really got him, though, that hit him with the force of a gunshot wound to the abdomen, was that his father had followed.

Crowley’s father had always been sympathetic. When a nineteen-year-old Crowley had come forward and said that he liked boys, his father had held his hand as his mother had ranted to him about his “life choices.” When he’d cried, later, his father had hugged him and whispered soothing words into his ear. Some part of Crowley had known that his mother would be angry enough to follow through on her promise of cutting him out of her life, but he’d never imagined that his father would do the same.

So Crowley stood stock-still, shocked beyond thinking, and let silent tears roll down his cheeks as he stared at where the shredded remains of his heart lay bleeding on the part of the floor where his parents had stood.

In the wake of everything that had just happened, Crowley had forgotten that he wasn’t alone in the shop. The soft touch of Eli’s hand on his shoulder made him jump, and he spun around with his tear-stained face screwed up in anger.

“Crowley,” Eli said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

“_Out_.” Crowley knew it was cruel, knew that he should let Eli stay with him, knew that he shouldn’t be alone, but the pin on Eli’s collar was mocking him and the tenderness in Eli’s eyes was cutting slices into his soul, so he snapped. “Get out.”

Eli didn’t move, so Crowley growled and pushed him toward the door.

“I said _out_, Eli.”

“Let me help, please.” Eli’s voice was unbearably soft, and Crowley choked on a sob.

“Leave. Me. The _fuck_. Alone.”

When Eli left, he looked back, and that made the pain of everything so much worse.

If a few things had been different, everything in Crowley’s world might have stayed in a state of approximate together-ness. If he’d put the date of his parents’ visit into the calendar correctly, if he’d remembered his coffee meeting with Eli in time to text him and call it off, if it hadn’t been pride month… Crowley’s mind became a ceaseless parade of that stupid, hopeless, useless two-letter word.

But time doesn’t run backwards even if you ask it to, so Crowley was stuck in the here and now.

The other thing that time doesn’t do is stop to give you time to regain your composure. It was a work day, and Crowley had two scheduled appointments to keep. He didn’t have time to stay in pieces, so he brushed the tears off of his face and clumsily re-tied the broken ends of the strings that had been holding him together. When he’d done that, he scooped his mangled heart off of the floor and crammed it back into its place in his chest. He could fall back to pieces later.

_Later _arrived that night when his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Crowley had been sitting in front of the telly, trying to focus on the lives of the people on the screen and not think about the events of his day, but the vibrations in his pocket had brought that effort to a screeching halt.

“Hi, Dad.” He hated how much his voice was shaking, hated that his fucked-up heart was leaping with the hope that his father had called to apologize.

_“Anthony, I need you to listen to me very carefully, alright?”_

“Yeah.” His hopes were fading by the millisecond.

_“Your mother doesn’t want to speak to you, but she asked me to tell you that you shouldn’t bother calling or coming home until you’ve figured out how to remove those influences from your life.” _Crowley’s heart fell out of his chest again, landing on the floor with a squishy thud. _“I’m sorry.”_

“What about you?” Crowley nearly shouted. He didn’t know that he could _be_ this angry, but somewhere between hearing confirmation that he wasn’t welcome at home and his father’s apology, he’d learned the meaning of fury. “You don’t want to see or hear from me, either?”

There was a pause, and the static that crackled across the line burned Crowley’s ear. _“It’s not that, son. Of course I want to see you. It’s just - well, she said I have a choice to make.”_

“And I didn’t come out on top.” It wasn’t a question because he already knew the answer. Crowley could feel the flatness in his own words, and he could taste the bitterness of his own hellfire-and-brimstone anger. “You chose her.”

_“I’m so sorry, Anthony.”_

“Yeah, it sure fucking seems like it.”

Again, his father’s silence was response enough, and an involuntary laugh escaped Crowley’s lips, tearing gashes in his throat on its way out. It was mirthless and high, and Crowley was horrified to know that he could even make a sound like that, but it was honest.

_“I love you, do you know that?”_ And fuck, that was just incomprehensibly cruel, so Crowley laughed that hollow laugh again.

“You love me, but not enough, I know. I get it.” Crowley couldn’t breathe, but he forced himself to say words that he knew he’d probably never get the chance to say again. “For what it’s worth, Dad, I love you, too.”

And then he hung up because there was nothing else that he could have done, and he collapsed face down onto his bed, his scream muffled by the dark bedclothes.

*********

Crowley was sitting on his sofa drinking some of the too-sweet tea that Anathema had brought for him in a Thermos when he heard heavy footsteps on the stairs outside of his flat.

“An?” She wasn’t supposed to be back for another few hours, but maybe one of her classes had been cancelled.

“Not quite,” Eli said from behind him, and Crowley’s chest tightened a little. “Sorry to barge in, but your front door was unlocked.”

_If I get murdered one day because Anathema forgets to lock my bloody door, I’m going to come back as a ghost just to kill her for it,_ Crowley thought. Briefly, he thought about making that joke out loud, but it didn't seem like the sort of thing that really fit the bill for this type of situation. The last thing he'd said to Eli had been a command to be left alone, and Crowley wasn't really sure how to come back from that. 

There was a lot that he wanted to say, but he couldn't seem to say any of it, so he settled for "Oh, hi."

"Hello." 

“What are you doing here?”

“Bringing you biscuits,” Eli said, and he walked over and put a foil-wrapped package on Crowley’s lap. “Seaghan made them for you.”

“That was nice of him,” Crowley mumbled.

Eli perched gingerly on the arm of the soft-sided chair next to the telly, watching Crowley with an expression that was an even blend of interest and concern. Crowley hated it when Eli looked at him like he knew every thought inside of his head; it was exactly the sort of vulnerable and helpless feeling that Crowley usually tried to avoid, and Eli just so happened to be very good at making him feel it (and was consequently something that Crowley was not at all happy about). So, he set about unwrapping the parcel of biscuits and tried to force the hairs on the back of his neck to stay lying down.

The silence was roaring in Crowley's ears, so he spoke again before sliding one of Seaghan's ginger biscuits into his mouth. "Sorry for yelling at you." He wasn't in the habit of apologizing. The words felt clunky and strange against his tongue, but anything was preferable to sitting in silence with Eli's knowing stare trained on him.

"It's perfectly alright. I forgive you." The silence fell again, and this time, Crowley didn't have any idea how to break it. Eli, however, did. “How are you doing?”

“I dunno, Eli. My parents don’t want to see me anymore because I like men and have male friends who also like men, how do you bloody think I’m doing?”

That came out a bit sharper than Crowley had intended, and he regretted it as soon as he’d said it.

“Sorry,” he said to the biscuits, still unable to look Eli in the eye. The word still cut at his tongue, but he swallowed the strange feeling with a sip of lukewarm tea. 

“You have every right to be angry, Crowley.” Eli's already-soft voice had gained an additional layer of plushness. “Besides, I know the feeling.”

Crowley’s head snapped up at that. “You what?”

Eli shrugged and leaned over to take a biscuit from the stack on Crowley’s lap (which Crowley thought was a bit funny - he’d brought them for Crowley, hadn’t he?). “I left Swansea at seventeen because I was tired of my parents looking at me like they wished I’d just disappear. I didn’t see the point in sticking around the people who hated me for something I didn’t choose and can’t control.” He took a tiny bite of his biscuit, seemingly unaware of the bomb that he’d just dropped on Crowley.

“Ah,” Crowley said stupidly. His mouth and brain were not quite operating at the frequency, apparently, but he managed to come up with, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Worked out for the best, I think.”

One of Crowley’s dark eyebrows slid up his forehead. “Oh? How d’you figure that?”

“I’m happier now,” Eli said, giving Crowley another gentle smile around a bite of biscuit.

“But they’re your family.” It sounded stupid when he said it out loud, but that was the thought that had been running through Crowley’s head in the thirty or so hours since his father and mother had left him standing in the middle of his shop.

Eli chuckled a bit at that, and Crowley’s confusion only grew. “No,” he said simply. “They’re not. Not really.”

“They… they are, though,” Crowley insisted.

“Family isn’t just the people who you’re born to,” Eli explained. “Sure, some people have families built for them, but sometimes those ‘families’ aren’t much good at all. So, I don’t think of my parents as my family, really. I’ve got a different one.”

“How?”

“I made one. I found a very nice few people who care about me, and they love me unconditionally. I’ve got older friends who are like my parents - they live outside of the city, and I go to theirs for Christmas every year. Some of the people I met at uni are my siblings.”

“That’s your family?”

“Yes,” Eli said, his dark eyes sparkling. “The one I was given didn’t love me, not really. So I built one that does.”

“My dad loves me,” Crowley said, automatically defensive even when he had no reason to be. Eli nodded, popped the last bit of biscuit into his mouth, and chewed it carefully, all the while staring at the ceiling like he was trying to see words that someone had written in invisible ink.

When he finally spoke, his words made Crowley feel like someone had put a cautery to the wounds in his chest. The words hurt, but they stopped the bleeding.

“I think you’ll find that there is a difference between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you, but.’ Families don’t say ‘I love you, but.’ Families say ‘I love you.’”

Crowley didn't have a response to that, but that was okay. Sometimes silence can be a good answer as well as a bad one. 

An easy sort of quiet settled over the room, and even though Crowley wasn’t really sure how it had happened, his lungs got better at being lungs and he started to actually breathe. Ever since the incident with his parents, he’d been drawing shallow breaths and barely getting enough oxygen to keep going, and he’d thought that it would always be that way. It didn’t seem like there was a way to fix that, didn’t seem like he’d ever go back to normal. But here he was, sitting on his sofa and watching Eli make his way through a second biscuit, and he could breathe.

It didn’t fix everything. It didn’t even make most things better. The pain in his chest was still there, and every beat of his heart and expansion of his lungs made it twinge again and again. But Eli had stopped the bleeding. There would always be scars on his chest to remind him, and they would be jagged and ugly and painful at some level forever. But Crowley found himself remembering that scars fade, and that thought was (for the time being, at least) enough.

After nearly a quarter of an hour, Crowley found his voice again. It was small, and it was shaking, but it was there.

“Would you be in my family, Eli?”

The smile that broke out across Eli’s face put the most brilliant supernovas to shame. “Only if you’ll be in mine.”

Things were not fixed. They couldn’t have been, really. But Crowley’s tattered heart had a few new stitches done in pristine white thread, and that was much better than nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Phew! You made it. Congrats. I love you. 
> 
> Some important numbers because it never hurts to have them:  
US Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1-800-273-8255  
Trevor Project Hotline: 1-866-488-7386  
Australian Lifeline: 13 11 14  
Australian Kids' Helpine: 1800 55 1800  
British Samaritans: 116 123  
British Shout (text only, but free): 85258


	8. Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley gets a phone call, and later, he gets a much-needed wake up call.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! 
> 
> So, as promised, the majority of the angst is over. But, because Crowley still has major emotional problems, this chapter isn't as fluffy as I thought it was going to be. It's important, and there are certainly funny moments, but it's not super soft. Sorry. 
> 
> Anyway! Thank you all so much for reading - for those of you who've been around since the start, I appreciate you so much! For those of you who are new readers, hello!! 
> 
> As always, comments and kudos make my day. Please never hesitate to comment because you think you'll annoy me - I LIVE for comments, and I do my best to respond to each one! (On a related note: I know I haven't gotten around to answering your comments on Chapter Seven yet, but this chapter kept bouncing around in my head and wouldn't let me do anything else until I'd written it. I'll get to them soon, I promise!) 
> 
> Warnings for language and references to past family trauma.

He shouldn’t have been missing the sound of his father’s voice. It hadn’t been that long, really, since they’d had their final conversation, and they’d definitely gone much longer without talking in the past. But somehow, in a cruel and logic-defying act of treason, Crowley’s heart ached anyway.

So, he was sat at his table, painting his nails with even coats of black polish. He lost himself in the rhythm of it, let his mind go blank and just followed the motions. Paint a layer, move to the next finger and the next and the next, wait for that hand to dry (and try in the meantime not to let his mind wander back in the direction of his father’s smile and hugs and laugh), do it again. A coat of clear, two coats of black, another coat of clear. Easy. Not complicated.

While he was painting the top coat onto his ring finger, his mobile clattered against the tabletop, buzzing with an incoming call. Crowley’s heart jumped into his throat, and for some insane reason, he expected to see “Dad” on the caller ID.

It wasn’t his father. It never really could have been, but he found his chest crumpling a bit in disappointment anyway.

No, the name on the screen was Eli Fell, and Crowley swiped to answer it so quickly that he smudged one of his still-wet nails. _My family_, he reminded himself as he raised the phone to his ear. _My real family._

“Hi,” Crowley said, doing his best to sound calm. Eli hadn’t ever called him before, so he had the sinking feeling that something had to have gone massively wrong for him to do so.

As soon as Eli spoke, that feeling intensified, and Crowley’s stomach dropped down into his boots. _“Are you home?”_

“Yeah.”

_“This is really quite embarrassing, but I’m outside. Are you in the mood for a visitor?”_

He wasn’t, really, but that visitor being Eli made all the difference, so he said that he’d be down to unlock the door and practically sprinted down the stairs.

Through the window, Crowley could see Eli pacing, bathed in the pale too-bright light of the moon and streetlamps. As Crowley got closer to the door, he could see that Eli’s shirtsleeves - which were long even though it was the middle of summer; Crowley and Seaghan had both teased Eli mercilessly for this on more than one occasion - were rolled sloppily up to his elbows, and the bowtie that Eli never went anywhere without was missing from around his neck.

Crowley’s first thought was that he’d never seen that much of Eli’s skin before. His second (and far more important) thought was that Eli looked terrible, so he held the door open wordlessly and motioned for Eli to come in.

Eli looked _lost_. That was the only way to describe it, really. He was looking around at Crowley’s darkened shop like he’d never been there before, and his eyes never settled on anything for more than a split second. Crowley could hear his breathing, too shallow and too fast, so he knew what was going on even if he didn’t know why. Eli was panicking about something, and Crowley knew all too well what that felt like.

“Come on,” Crowley said in a softer voice than he’d possibly ever used before in his life. He reached for Eli’s arm, only remembering at the last second that his nails were still wet and that he didn’t want to get smears of black fingernail polish trapped in Eli’s (very fair and very soft-looking, oh _God_ he needed to get his head on straight) arm hair.

When they’d made it up the stairs, Eli collapsed onto the sofa. He still hadn’t said a word, which was far beyond worrying. In all the time that Crowley had known Eli, he’d never seen him this quiet for this long.

“Eli,” he said softly, stopping himself from reaching out again. “Tea or whiskey?”

Eli flinched a little and looked up at Crowley as though he’d forgotten where he was. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Crowley. Did you say something?”

“I asked if you wanted tea or whiskey.”

“Tea,” Eli said, his normally soft smile looking strained and forced. Something inside of Crowley’s chest twinged as he crossed to the kitchen and put the kettle on. He knew from past experience that Eli’s favorite tea was oolong, but he didn’t have any on hand, so he settled for chamomile. When he sat down in the chair by the sofa, draping his long legs over the armrest and squishing the rest of his body up against the back of the chair, Eli didn’t even acknowledge that he’d come back into view.

Crowley didn’t say anything at first. He just looked, just traced the lines of Eli’s body with his eyes and tried to find clues about what could have gone wrong from Eli’s body language. Usually, if Eli was seated and not holding Seaghan’s hand, his hands were folded primly in his lap. Now, though, they were buried in his curls. His wide brown eyes were squeezed shut, and the soft pink mouth that was normally curved in a smile was flat and turned down at the edges. Even the round edges of Eli’s body seemed to be sharper and straighter, somehow, like he’d forgotten to be the way that he was.

It was disconcerting to say the least, so when Crowley got up again to pour the tea, he came back with an almost-full bottle of whiskey (cheap, as everything that Crowley usually drank was) as well. He figured it couldn’t hurt to have the option, and Eli looked like he needed it.

He set the bottle and both mugs of steaming tea down on his coffee table with a heavy thunk and went to collect his nail polish from where it sat half-open on the other table. In the kitchen, he’d gotten a look at his fingernails and seen that all but one of them had been wrinkled or smudged beyond repair, so he disappeared into his bathroom and came back with cotton pads and acetone.

Eli had flinched again when Crowley had put the tea and liquor down, but he’d made no move to touch either in the minutes since. So, before he got to work re-painting his nails, Crowley nudged Eli’s mug of tea - it contained nearly as much cream and sugar as it did actual tea, which was both something that Eli loved and something that Crowley was disgusted by - across the table and cleared his throat.

Like before, something in Eli seemed to snap him back into this plane of reality, and an apology was rolling out off his tongue before Crowley could say anything. “Sorry. I’m really not all here tonight, am I?”

“No,” Crowley admitted, rubbing an acetone-soaked bit of cotton over his ruined nails. “Would this spontaneous late-night visit possibly be connected to the reason why?”

Eli blushed, and Crowley busied himself with removing the last of the polish from his fingers. “I didn’t mean to come here, actually. It just sort of… happened. I was walking to clear my head, and then I looked up and saw your shop, but it took me about a half hour to call you.”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to disturb you,” Eli said, taking an overly ambitious gulp of tea. A stray drop ran down his chin and dripped onto the collar of his shirt, and Crowley watched it spread into a tiny tan splotch. That was unusual, too. Eli was almost agonizingly careful about whatever he put in his mouth; he took tiny rabbit-like nibbles of any handheld foods, cut his meals into bite-size portions, and never put enough liquid in his mouth to run the risk of spilling on his shirt. Conversely, one of the reasons why Crowley always wore black (although he’d never admit it because he wanted people to think that he was edgy and dangerous and this part of the real reason would have thoroughly destroyed that image) was because he spilled some sort of food or drink on himself nearly every time he ate or drank anything, and black clothing didn’t show stains as much. Eli had chastised him about taking more reasonable mouthfuls on more than one occasion, and Crowley had usually responded to these comments with an eye roll or a very mature sticking out of his tongue. So, it was jarring and almost upsetting to see that Eli had not only allowed a drop of tea to touch his shirt but also that he didn’t seem to be aware that it had happened.

“You wouldn’t have disturbed me,” Crowley said, which was as close to _I’m-glad-you-called_ as he was willing to go.

“I might have.”

“You didn’t.”

Eli reached for his tea again, and this time his gaze rested for a moment on the whiskey bottle as though he’d just noticed it was there. “I thought I said tea, Crowley.”

Crowley shrugged and cast Eli a smirk. “I brought it just in case.”

As soon as he’d spoken, he realized that he’d inadvertently echoed the inscription in the front cover of his now-very-well-loved copy of _The Importance of Being Earnest_. He’d read it no less than five times since he’d received it, and it still made him smile every time. Whether the smile was due to the clever wording or the fact that it was from Eli was, obviously, of no consequence. Crowley’s accidental riff on Eli’s own words was something that Eli would have ordinarily picked up on, but in his current state of distress, all he could manage was a sorry attempt at a smile as he reached for the bottle.

As Eli tipped the bottle into his mouth, Crowley’s jaw dropped open a bit in shock. Eli was so proper that Crowley had thought that he’d have asked for glasses or at the very least dumped a few shots’ worth into his tea, but he’d evidently been wrong. After a few swallows, Eli made a face and recapped the bottle, putting it back onto the table with the dull thunk of glass on wood.

“This is very bad whiskey.”

Crowley snapped his jaw back into place and scowled. “Yes, but it’s alcohol, which is what matters.”

“You have no standards.”

“Uh-huh.” He was bending over his hands again, painting his nails with precise strokes.

“I should bring you better liquor. Remind me.”

“Don’t need it,” Crowley grunted. Cheap alcohol worked just as well as the higher-quality stuff for getting him drunk, so it was really just economical to save money when getting plastered happened as often as it did for Crowley.

“Yes, but _I_ do,” Eli sniffed. Crowley looked up from his fingers at that, trying to gauge whether or not Eli was aware of the implication of that statement (namely that Eli would be in Crowley’s flat often enough in the future to warrant having his own supply of alcohol). If he knew what he’d said, Eli didn’t show it. He was staring off into space again, wringing his palms together idly as he sat.

People didn’t really come to Crowley with personal problems because anyone who knew him knew that he was about as good at being supportive as he was at being normal. But, given that Eli was sitting glumly on Crowley’s sofa and looking a bit like someone had clubbed him over the head with a cricket bat, he evidently hadn’t thought of that. So, because he didn’t know what else to do, Crowley figured he’d make an attempt at humor and see if he could coax a smile out of his friend before jumping into whatever the fuck had brought Eli to his flat at this hour of night.

“You’re welcome to bring your own stuff, then. Better than An - she takes whatever she wants from me without asking.” He’d been hoping for a smile, but Eli didn’t even look at him in acknowledgement that he’d spoken, so Crowley set his polish down on the table and leaned forward. “What the fuck is going on, Eli?”

“It’s Seaghan.”

Instantly, the jealousy and anger that Crowley had tucked away flared to life in his chest with an unprecedented heat.

“What did he do?”

Eli raised his hands and made a calm-down-you-idiot motion, dark eyes gone wide with shock at the venom in Crowley’s voice. “Nothing, he didn’t do anything! He just… well, he’s got a job offer at the Louvre, and he’s going to take it.”

“Oh.” The anger gave way to fear, which Crowley tried to mask by ducking his head once more and applying clear polish over his newly-black nails.

“He wants me to go with him to Paris.” And there it was. Crowley had seen it coming. He knew that the friendships in his life always came with expiration dates; this one was just a bit (a lot) sooner than he’d wanted it to be.

“I hear good things about the pastries in Paris.” Crowley had been trying for humor, but it came out sounding flat, his voice raspy from the tightness in his throat. Slowly and without looking up, Crowley screwed on the caps of his nail polish bottles and set them to the side, blowing gently on the finished product in order to help them dry faster. He could feel Eli’s intense stare boring into the top of his head, but he couldn’t make himself look up and face it. He didn’t think that he could handle the emotional blow of looking into the eyes of his family as they told him that they were leaving _again_.

“I don’t want to go with him,” Eli blurted, and Crowley’s heart gave a dangerous lurch against his ribcage. “That’s the problem, see? I don’t want to go to Paris.”

Crowley felt the need to clarify because there had been two very different I-don’t-want-to-go statements in what Eli had just said. “Do you not want to go to Paris, or do you not want to go with Seaghan?”

“I can’t leave London.” The whiskey bottle had made its way back into Eli’s shaking hands, and he took another swig, settling the open bottle on his lap with one of his hands still wrapped around the neck. “My life is here, I can’t leave.”

“So, this job. Seaghan won’t stay here?”

Eli shook his head, and his messed-up curls bounced around and got even more tangled. “No. Working at the Louvre is his _dream_. The job he’s got is as a docent - which I think is beneath him, he’s too brilliant for that - but he says he’ll work his way up.” More of Crowley’s cheap whiskey disappeared down Eli’s throat, and Crowley felt the urge to take away the bottle. Normally, he was all for people drinking themselves into oblivion when they had feelings to crush down (it was how he lived his life most of the time, so he couldn’t exactly condemn it in others), but this seemed like a conversation that Eli needed to have, and he needed to be coherent enough to talk and understand.

So, in a move that was very possibly not a wise one, Crowley said, “Hey, d’you think you might want to share the bottle, mate?” and Eli, ever the giver, handed it over without thought.

Crowley took a small drink from the bottle, capped it, and set it on the floor near his chair. He searched for something to say, something comforting, but the only thing that came to mind was a question that he’d never thought would leave his lips. It also was a question that he was not sure he wanted to know the answer to, but he resolved to ask it anyway.

By the time he worked up the resolve to actually _do_ the asking, a larger number of minutes than he'd have liked had passed, and Eli was pulling at his curls again.

“Do you love him?”

Eli stared at him, his eyes already a little glassy from the significant amount of alcohol he’d consumed. “What?”

“Seaghan,” Crowley said. “Do you love him?”

“I… not in that way, no.” Eli’s body shook with a hiccup, then, and Crowley suppressed a chuckle. Lightweight, apparently. “I care for ‘im very much - ‘s a good person, you know? And he likes me. But I’m not in love with him, yet.”

“Yet?” That last word had picked at the jealous part of Crowley’s soul, and something close to disappointment was gnawing at his stomach.

“I think I could be in love wi’ him, if I had more time,” Eli said, slumping down a bit on the couch and folding his hands around his soft belly. It looked a bit closer to normal. Not perfect, because Eli had immaculate posture, but closer.

“Mmm.”

Eli sighed and let his head loll against the back of the couch. “I don’t want to hurt him.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow. “What did you say when he asked you?”

“That I’d thing- _think_ about it.”

“But you don’t want to go.”

“No,” Eli said sadly. “Don’ wanna go.”

Crowley didn’t say anything for a minute, just watched as silent tears began to roll down Eli’s cheeks. It was startling, somehow, to see Eli’s face be so different than normal. The joy was gone from it, and Crowley thought that he looked rather a lot like a small child lost in a supermarket. Eventually, Crowley cleared his throat and said the only thing that he could think to say.

“I’m sorry, Eli.” There was a sniffle, and then Eli said something that crushed the air out of Crowley’s lungs.

“I am, too.”

By the time Eli stopped crying, the polish on Crowley’s fingers had hardened, and he handed the whiskey bottle back to Eli without so much as a word. Eli eyed it for a few seconds, apparently considering just how drunk he really wanted to get, before he took two large gulps and handed Crowley the rest (which was just enough to fill about an inch at the bottom of the bottle - evidently, Eli had decided that _shit-faced_ was the right amount of drunk). Smirking, Crowley finished the bottle and set it aside, enjoying the burn on his tongue and waiting for the slight buzz to kick in.

Over the course of the next few hours, Crowley had been talked into opening a second bottle, and so by the time four in the morning rolled around, Crowley and Eli were both three sheets to the wind and talking about love.

“Y’don’t have a b’yfriend or a girlfrien’,” Eli pointed out, poking at Crowley’s chest with a wobbly finger.

“Nah,” Crowley said. “Not worth it. ‘S _compl'cated_.”

Eli was having none of that. “But ‘s _fun_. ‘S nice.”

“Huh?” Crowley’s brain was having trouble keeping up.

“_Snuggles_,” Eli said emphatically. He sounded like a five-year-old talking like that, but Crowley was too drunk to notice. “Boys give good snuggles.”

“Wouldn’ know.”

If Eli’s eyes could have fallen out of his head, they would have. “You’ve nev- never _snuggled_?”

“Nah,” Crowley said again. “‘S like I said: feelin’s, those’re compleck- whatever, too hard.”

“I _like_ snuggles,” Eli whispered, leaning in close like he was sharing the world’s best-kept secret. “Bes’ part of datin’, I say.”

Crowley snorted. “Wha’, you don’ like the sex?” Crowley himself, for what it was worth, definitely did not like sex, but he was in the habit of keeping up appearances.

“No sex,” Eli said, suddenly very serious and slightly more coherent than the laws of biology should have permitted. “I’m ace. Don’ do sex, nope.”

Throughout the night, Crowley’s alcohol-soaked brain had been very adamant about reminding him that Eli had very kissable-looking lips, but he’d managed to keep thinking about Seaghan, which stopped him from doing a very stupid thing. At that moment, though, when Eli had said the word “ace” out loud, Crowley nearly forgot about Seaghan. Luckily, though, his logic kicked in, and he managed to play off his lean-in as a drunken slump.

So, in lieu of kissing Eli, Crowley said, “Me, too.”

Eli blinked at him. “Huh?”

“Ace. Me, too.”

“No sex?”

“No sex.”

“No sex is _good_.”

“Yeah,” Crowley agreed, far too taken in by Eli’s megawatt grin to realize that he’d just announced that particular fact to someone for the first time in his life. Even _Anathema_ didn’t know that, and now Eli did.

“So, y’don’t do sex, but y' also don’ wanna have relatio... re-la-tion-ships,” Eli said, carefully slowing down his speech to make sure he got the word right.

“Yup.”

“I don’ get you,” Eli said. “Tha’s dumb.”

And Crowley replied to that the same way he always did, if a bit more slurred: “Not dumb. ‘S _smart_.”

Eli grunted at him before falling onto his side and tucking his body into the cushions of the sofa. From his perch on the chair, Crowley could see Eli’s open eyes, and he could feel them trained on him.

“G’night, Crowley,” Eli said softly, and Crowley couldn’t help but smile.

“Night.”

When Crowley woke up in the morning, it was to the sound of Eli groaning, “Oh, _God_,” from the sofa, and in spite of everything, Crowley chuckled into his pillow. He got up and trudged to the kitchen, giving a half-hearted wave to the cream-and-white-colored lump on the couch. The lump grunted at him in response.

Crowley was hungover, certainly, but he’d been far worse before. He remembered everything from the previous night, and as he made tea and toast, found that he actually wished that he didn’t remember certain things. Eli knew his secrets, now. He knew about the anti-romance thing, which meant he knew that Crowley was a coward for the sake of protecting his own self-security, and he also knew about Crowley’s asexuality.

The more Crowley thought about it, though, he realized that it was a bit of a relief to have someone else know about his sexual preferences (or rather, lack thereof), and that it was very comforting to have that other person be both his friend and just as ace as he was. So, when the tea was made and the toast was buttered, Crowley walked over to the coffee table with an aura of uncomfortable happiness.

“Never,” Eli said into the cushion that was pressed against his face, “let me drink that much _ever. Again_.”

“No promises,” Crowley said. “Here. Tea, toast, and paracetamol.”

Eli lifted his head and blinked blearily at Crowley. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Drink your tea, you stupid bastard.”

Eli’s responding smile was partially hidden by the mug that he’d lifted to his lips, but Crowley knew it was there anyway, and his heart pounded a little harder in his chest.

*********

Seaghan Thomas was standing in Crowley’s shop, his bottle-red hair gleaming in the overhead lights. He was smiling, but that smile was tinged with a bit of sadness at the ends, and Crowley didn’t really know what to do with that.

“Come for another tattoo?”

“No,” Seaghan said, leaning against the doorway with practiced grace. “I wanted to talk to you.”

Inexplicably, a bolt of fear struck through Crowley’s body, and he felt like he was trying to swallow a mouthful of cotton balls. “Oh?”

“I take it that you know about me and Eli.” It didn’t sound accusatory in the slightest, just a mere statement of fact, so Crowley nodded. He’d met Eli for their usual coffee four days prior (which was four days after the whiskey-and-sleeping-on-the-couch incident), and Eli had told him that he’d broken things off with Seaghan. He hadn’t seen the point in prolonging a relationship that was inevitably going to end; he’d thought that dragging it out simply caused unnecessary pain for both of them, so he’d ended things. Last Crowley had heard, Seaghan would still be in London for just under a month.

“Yeah, I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Thanks.”

Crowley fidgeted with the inside seams of his pockets, searching for something to say. “Congrats on the job, though, mate.”

“Thanks,” Seaghan said again, but this time his smile got a little brighter and a little less sad. “Anyway. I came by because I wanted to tell you thanks.”

_That_ was not what Crowley had been expecting. Well, he hadn’t really been expecting anything - he was a bit wrapped up in his confusion over Seaghan’s decision to come to the shop at all - but as soon as Seaghan thanked him, he realized that there was at least one thing that he had _not_ been anticipating. So, he stared blankly at Seaghan and said, “What?”

“Thank you,” Seaghan repeated.

“For what?”

“Not getting in the way of things happening between me and Eli.”

Crowley’s face grew hot. “Why would I have?”

“Because you fancy him.” The way Seaghan said it was matter-of-fact, as emotionless and practical as if he’d just stated a historical fact or commented on the blueness of the sky. No one had ever accused Crowley of fancying anyone before in his life; he was very careful to not have the feelings associated with romance, and yet here Seaghan was, stating that Crowley had a thing for Eli in plain language in the middle of broad daylight.

Of course, Crowley protested.

“I don’t.”

Seaghan grinned at him. “Sure, okay.”

“Really,” Crowley said, defensive despite the fact that his cheeks matched Seaghan’s hair. “I _don’t_.”

“When I first asked Eli to come to the museum with me, you were looking at me like you wished I’d disappear. The first time I joined the two of you for coffee, you kept staring at me like you were plotting my murder. Ever since then, it’s been harder to see, but sometimes I still feel you watching me like that.”

“I didn’t- I _haven’t_.” It was a weak protest, and Crowley knew that, but he had to try. Anything was better than admitting that what Seaghan was saying was actually true.

Seaghan softened, his smile resembling Eli’s so much that it was almost painful. “That’s not why I know, though. It’s possible that you’re just protective of your friends - I get that, really, I do. I’m that way. But I know you care about Eli in the same way that I do because I see how you look at him when you think no one’s watching you.”

“And how’s that, then?” Crowley’s jaw was tightening with every word that slipped between Seaghan’s thin lips.

“You look at him like you’re terrified of losing him.”

Crowley opened his mouth to deliver some sort of biting retort, but none came. He just stood there, mouth flopping open and shut like a fish out of water, grasping around for some of his usual defensive sarcasm, but he didn’t find any. Finally, he closed his mouth with a snap and leveled a glare at Seaghan, who laughed a little.

“Anyway. It bothered me, at first, but I figured out pretty quickly that you weren’t going to do anything about it. And I like you, just so you know. A lot. You’re a good person.”

“Not really,” Crowley said, finding his voice again at last.

“No, you are. Eli says you’re good for him, and I agree. You’re good for me, too.”

“Nah.”

“You _are_. I’m actually going to miss you, you jealous son-of-a-bitch.” Seaghan’s tone was teasing, but there was sincerity there. “You’re a brilliant artist, and you’ve got good taste in music. And good taste in men, come to think of it.”

“I’ll miss you, too,” Crowley said, intentionally skipping over responding to that last comment. To his surprise, he found that he actually meant it: somehow, Seaghan had come to mean something to him over the past months, and it felt a little odd to know that he wouldn’t be seeing that toothy grin or smug smirk again any time soon.

“Also, I wanted to tell you that I’m leaving this week. I’m technically done at the Gallery on Tuesday, so I thought I’d just go ahead and get settled in France. Explore the city a bit before I have to work and all that.” He paused. “Besides, it’s not like I’ve got a boyfriend keeping me here any longer.”

Crowley winced. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. For the best, I think.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I think we could’ve worked together - y’know, for the long haul - if I’d’ve chosen to stay or he’d’ve chosen to come with me. But we didn’t, so it’s probably better that we find other people who’ll make us happy again.”

“You’ve got a surprisingly optimistic outlook on things, mate.”

Seaghan’s smile got wider. “Wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t.”

“Ah,” Crowley said.

“So, yeah. Just wanted to say thanks for letting me be around. I’m glad I met you.”

“Mmm,” said Crowley. “Good luck in Paris.”

“Thanks. If you’re ever in France and need a tour of the Impressionist wing, ask for me.”

“Sure.”

Seaghan hugged him, then, and Crowley flashed back to a very similar-feeling hug that he’d gotten from another member of Seaghan’s family in the dining room of an expensive restaurant. Briefly, as he wrapped his arms around Seaghan’s shoulders for a quick squeeze, Crowley spared a thought for Maggie and wondered if Seaghan had told her what had happened with his parents. It didn’t matter, really, if she knew, but he wondered anyway.

Seaghan was halfway out the door when he turned back around and said, “You should tell him, you know.”

“What?”

“Tell Eli how you feel about him. If you don’t, another me will come along, and maybe that one will stick around.”

“I don’t feel anything like that, I already told you,” Crowley lied.

Seaghan shook his head and laughed again. “Let me rephrase that, then. If you ever own up to your feelings, tell him. Much as it kills me to say it, I think you two would be good together.”

“Ngh,” Crowley said.

“Give him some time to get over me first, though, will you? I’m gonna suffer for a bit, so it’s not really fair if he gets off easy.” It was a joke, sort of, but Crowley understood the sentiment.

“Bye, Seaghan.”

“See you.” And then Seaghan was gone, walking away from Crowley’s shop for the last time. Under his shirt where no one could see it, Crowley’s carefully-traced lines of black ink formed the shape of a stylized dragon. That would go everywhere with him, and there was a sort of irony in that. Part of Crowley was going with Seaghan to France, and all of Eli was staying behind.

Ever since Eli had told him about the breakup, Crowley had been keeping himself busy with drawing, consulting, and tattooing during the day, and he’d gone to the bars two nights in a row to find someone to get drunk with and kiss against the walls in dingy dark corners. He didn’t want to think about his feelings, but now Seaghan had brought it up. The emotions that he’d shoved into forgotten places in his soul started to crawl out toward the light, and his heart had grabbed them and shoved them to the forefront of Crowley’s mind. So, Crowley sank into the chair behind his front desk and propped his booted feet up on the top of it. Leaning back, he scrubbed at his eyes and forced himself to think about things.

After five minutes, Crowley put his feet back on the ground, took a deep breath, and let his forehead hit the desktop with a dangerous-sounding thunk. All evidence pointed to the fact that he liked Eli as more than a friend.

That, in Crowley’s opinion, really fucking sucked.


	9. Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley resolves to be a better friend to Eli in the interest of hopefully getting up the courage to do something romantic. He's a coward, though, so things don't exactly go according to plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! 
> 
> Sorry for the few day gap in posting - some stuff happened, but I'm doing a bit better now. I hope you all like this chapter! It's a real rollercoaster, and it's pretty long, but I think you'll like the end ;) Also, this chapter is really dialogue-heavy, so heads up for that.
> 
> Crowley is still a dumb fucking idiot, sorry. That's not entirely going to change, but it'll get better (?). 
> 
> As always, comments and kudos are the lifeblood in my writer's veins! If you don't feel like leaving comments here or just would like to get to know me a bit more, I'd love to chat with you on Tumblr (link in end note)! 
> 
> I love you all very much and hope you're having a wonderful start to your week. 
> 
> Warnings for language and alcohol use.

Crowley’s emotions had, if possible, become even more of a tangled-up mess since his conversation with Seaghan. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to let Eli go, telling him that Eli would be better off in the arms of a man with an emotional IQ higher than a five-year-old’s and reminding him that he’d never once in his entire life made anyone happy. Everyone Crowley had ever loved had left him. Anathema was still around, sure, but he knew from past experience that even she was unlikely to be around for long. He was very good at pushing people away, and the people who stuck around inevitably left for something better or were taken from him by forces beyond his control. Crowley didn’t want to add Eli to his list of Loved and Lost, so in some respects, it made sense for him to continue to ignore his feelings.

But Seaghan’s words were rattling around in his head. _“If you don’t, another me will come along, and maybe that one will stick around.”_ Somewhere between that comment and his self-admission that he did in fact have feelings of a romantic nature for Eli Fell, Crowley had come to understand the meaning of the phrase “before it’s too late.” With every brick that Crowley had added to his emotional walls because of Eli, the empty cavity in his chest where his feelings should have gone got wider and wider. But now, Seaghan’s stupid fucking smile and stupid fucking advice and that stupid fucking tattoo were mocking him, and that cavity had filled with a sort of determination that he’d never had before. A very small part of Crowley had actually started to believe that maybe, if everything went perfectly, he could touch Eli and not destroy him. Even more than that, though, he was beginning to hope that someday Eli could touch _him_ and he wouldn’t get burned.

So, for once in his life, Crowley was trying to listen to the smaller voice (which sounded suspiciously like Seaghan’s, but he didn’t like to dwell too much on that), and he’d made up his mind that he was going to do his best to be the kind of man Eli deserved. The problem with this plan was, of course, that Crowley had absolutely no idea how to go about doing this.

One thing that he did know was that Eli was just getting out of a many-month-long relationship with a man he cared for very much, and so Crowley decided to be the best friend he could be and wait until Eli had gotten over Seaghan to do anything romantic at all.

As part of his effort towards being the best possible friend to Eli, Crowley had offered to spend time with Eli outside of work hours. This was why he now found himself sprawled out on a lumpy tartan-patterned sofa in the back room of a certain cluttered and dusty used bookshop, drinking a chilled glass of white wine and listening to his friend ramble on about a book he’d never even heard of.

“... it’s really quite marvelous, Crowley. You’d like it, I think. It’s a very good commentary on the state of things in the world, really. Bradbury was more right than he even knew.” Eli was smiling at him, and Crowley’s insides folded themselves into poorly-executed origami shapes.

“Mmm,” said Crowley, giving Eli a quick smile back and taking an over-large sip of wine to calm his nerves. He was supposed to be keeping himself under control, and after he’d done that, he was supposed to be being _romantic_. What he was currently thinking of doing (knocking the glass out of Eli’s hand, pressing him up against the peeling-wallpaper-covered walls of the backroom, and kissing the stupid beautiful bastard until they both forgot the mechanics of breathing) accomplished neither of those goals, so he shook his head slightly to clear those thoughts from his mind.

“I’ve got a copy you can read, if you like.”

Before he could stop himself, Crowley found himself saying yes, and Eli bustled out of the room to find the book. To Crowley’s surprise, he heard the old wooden stairs leading up to Eli’s flat (he’d never been in there, but he knew where it was because Eli had once made an off-handed comment about both of them living above their shops) creaking. He’d expected that this book would be in the main shop with all of the other thousands of books that Eli loved, and yet apparently it wasn’t. This meant that Eli wasn’t content with all of the moving and breathing space in his place of business being taken up by books; he’d done the same to the place where he went to relax. Crowley nearly laughed out loud at that. Some people really loved things so much.

It dawned on him a moment later that he actually did something quite similar. He had a great number of sketchbooks stored in various places in his own flat, and there were even more downstairs in the shop in which he kept his finished ideas for tattoos. Every part of his space was tainted with art in the same way that every part of Eli’s was tainted with words, and that made a sort of tingle run down his spine. When Eli returned a few moments later, slightly out of breath and holding a leather-bound copy of _Fahrenheit 451_, Crowley had to stop himself from kissing him (again).

“Here you are.” Eli set the book gingerly on Crowley’s chest (Crowley was essentially lying down across the sofa, head propped up at one end and feet slung over the other) and settled himself back down in the cushy chair a few feet away.

Crowley set his wine glass on the end table behind his head and flipped open the book to the title page. He didn’t know what he’d expected to find, but _“Crowley, Don’t burn this, please. -E”_ wasn’t it. With a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, Crowley raised a dark eyebrow in Eli’s direction.

“You’ll understand that when you read it,” Eli said, the tips of his ears a bit pinker than they usually were.

“Mmm,” Crowley said again. “Thanks.”

“It’s my pleasure. There are many great worlds that you haven’t yet lived in, and it’s my absolute joy to bring them to you.”

“Worlds?”

“Books are their own worlds, Crowley. Some are better than ours - this one isn’t one of those, you’ll see what I mean - and it’s a privilege to spend time in them.”

“You talk like a bloody poet,” Crowley grumbled. When he reached for his glass again, though, he was still smiling, and Eli’s dark eyes caught his for a moment and sparkled.

The conversation turned to other things after that, and by half-eleven they’d made their way through two bottles of wine. Crowley was pleasantly tipsy and Eli, ever the lightweight, was well across the line into drunk.

“I love the stars,” Eli sighed, slouching down even further in his chair. It looked like his spine had disappeared entirely, and Crowley stifled an alcohol-soaked giggle. “They’re s’ _pretty_, y’know?”

“I know.” In his mind, Crowley made a note of that. Something with stars, then. Could be romantic.

“Love ‘em,” Eli said again, blinking his wide, soft eyes at Crowley. “Nice to look at.”

“Uh-huh.”

Even in his inebriated state, Eli somehow managed to fix Crowley with what Crowley had come to call the X-Ray Stare. Crowley would have been impressed that Eli was able to pull it off with a full bottle of wine in his system if he hadn’t been so caught up in becoming very uncomfortable very quickly.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Crowley said softly.

“Like what?”

“Like you’re trying to see through me.”

Eli laughed. “Cr’wly, ‘m not trying to see _through_ you. Tryin’ to see _in_ you.”

Crowley straightened slightly at that. “Huh?”

“Figure ya out,” Eli explained. “Yer confes- confu- you don’ make sense.”

Crowley was, quite frankly, not drunk enough for this conversation, but there wasn’t any more wine and he didn’t know where Eli kept the hard stuff, so he swung his legs around and stood up, raking his hands through his dark hair. “It’s late, Eli.”

Immediately, Eli’s face crumpled. “Oh. Yeah.”

“I should go.”

“Yeah.”

Crowley didn’t move. Eli didn’t ask him to. They just stood there, watching each other. Finally, Crowley cleared his throat and repeated himself.

“I should go.”

“Okay.”

“Goodnight.”

“See ya t’morrow?”

Crowley’s fight-or-flight instincts had kicked in (old habits die hard and all that), so he said, “Maybe,” grabbed the book Eli had given him off of the table, and basically ran out the door.

The next afternoon, Crowley closed the shop after his last appointment and walked to The Quill and Ink, his hands shoved into the front pockets of his too-tight jeans. When he stepped inside, Eli was behind the counter, smiling a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, and it felt like someone had hit Crowley in the chest. Silently, Crowley slipped between the bookshelves nearest the register and watched Eli from there.

The bloke at the counter looked to be a bit older than either Crowley or Eli, but he evidently wasn’t letting that deter him from giving a spot of flirting his best effort. With every book that Eli scanned and bagged, the man leaned in a little closer, and his smile got a little wider.

“That’ll be forty pounds ten, sir,” Eli said, the politeness in his voice slightly forced. The guy made a great show of digging his wallet out of his pocket, and he put a fifty-pound note down on the counter.

When Eli opened the register to get change, the man laid his hand on top of Eli’s and said, “Keep the change.” His voice was smooth and decidedly not British - American, Crowley decided, and hated him even more.

“That’s very kind of you.”

The man smiled smugly, still not letting go of Eli’s hand. “How about you grab a drink with me on Friday night? No pressure for anything else, just a drink.”

Crowley ground his teeth so hard they squeaked.

“No, thank you,” Eli said, pulling his hand away and pushing the bag of books across the counter. “I’ve just got out of a relationship.”

The bloke’s smile faltered. “Ah. Well, worth the ask.”

“Yes,” Eli said, and the smile on his own face tinged his eyes. Just a bit, but Crowley noticed, and the muscles in his already-tight jaw jumped. “Thank you for coming in.”

“If I’m back in a few weeks, don’t act too surprised to see me.”

Eli laughed, and Crowley felt like punching the bloke right in his perfectly-straight American teeth. “If you ask again, don’t be surprised if my answer hasn’t changed.”

Well, at least that gave Crowley a timeline for when not to do anything romantic.

“See you then,” the bloke said, and with one more parting grin, slipped out the front door.

No sooner had he gone than Eli said, “Crowley,” and Crowley nearly jumped out of his skin. Sheepishly, he poked his head out from around the bookcases and managed to give Eli a little wave.

Eli sniffed at him. “I saw you come in.”

“Yeah.”

“You usually don’t come by until the evening.”

Crowley shrugged. “Closed early.”

“Why?” Eli turned around and punched something into the old desktop computer on the desk behind his front counter. “If I heard you correctly, you said last night that you weren’t sure whether or not you’d be by today. That level of enthusiasm doesn’t seem to warrant closing your shop early.”

In all the time he’d known Eli, Crowley had never seen him as cold and stoic as this, and it was deeply unsettling. He knew that he shouldn’t have run off the night before, but he’d thought that maybe Eli had been drunk enough not to take too much offense to it.

He’d been dead wrong, apparently.

“Sorry,” Crowley said, and Eli’s unnaturally still posture relaxed a bit.

“Are you?” The biting tone was still there, and Crowley winced.

“Yeah. I wasn’t thinking straight. I just- I didn’t know how to answer you. A lot of people don’t understand me, but no one other than An has ever really tried to. I wasn’t expecting you to bring it up.”

Eli sighed, and he braced himself against the desk for a moment, back visibly heaving with every deep breath he was taking. Crowley had moved away from the bookshelves, now, and he was standing on the other side of the checkout counter, doing his best to look genuinely contrite. He didn’t apologize often (other than when it came to Eli - with him, the word “sorry” came out of Crowley’s mouth with alarming regularity), so he wasn’t sure how best to make his face reflect his words.

When Eli finally turned around, his big eyes were watery, and Crowley’s gut wrenched. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Last night, when I told you that I don’t understand you - I didn’t mean to scare you off.”

Crowley shrugged. “I didn’t mean to run.” Apologizing a third time seemed excessive, so Crowley left it at that.

“I meant it, though,” Eli said after a moment, and Crowley raised an eyebrow. “You know a lot about me because I talk a lot. I don’t really know much about you other than what you’ve shown me, and… well, what I wasn’t supposed to see.”

“What? Oh. Right, that.” His parents abandoning him, yeah. That was something Crowley could have done with Eli not seeing, but the conversation that followed had helped a bit, so in a weird way, he was almost grateful now that Eli had been there to see it.

“You know a lot about me. But I don’t know much about you.”

_That’s fucking intentional!_ Crowley wanted to scream. _If you know, you’ll leave, and I don’t want you to leave._

He couldn’t find any words at all, though, so he just stood stock-still and stared at Eli.

Eli rushed out from around the counter and stopped in front of Crowley. Crowley had almost a whole head on him, but somehow, Crowley felt like the smaller one.

“It doesn’t have to be big things,” Eli said softly, all trace of the earlier sharpness gone from his voice. “Just little things.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to know you. Because you’re my… friend, and I want to know you.”

“I’m not good at sharing things.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’ll forget.”

“I’ll remind you.”

Crowley sighed. “What kinds of things do you want to know?”

“Anything.”

At that moment, the door to Eli’s shop swung open, and Eli’s demeanor changed. In an instant, his friendly customer-service smile was back on his face, and he walked over to greet the newcomers. Crowley retreated back between the bookshelves, hiding from the crowd of nosy old ladies who’d come in looking for new books to read. While he waited for Eli to help them (and _get them to leave_, mostly), Crowley thought about the things he knew about Eli.

Eli liked feeding the ducks because there was a duck pond by the park near where he grew up in Wales, and he’d spend his Saturdays down there talking to the ducks about the boys he liked. Eli’s favorite tea was oolong, but he sometimes went in for a chai on a cold winter day. He dumped way too much cream and sugar into his coffee (if he ever drank it) because he’d never liked the taste. But he liked the smell, so he had a coffee-scented candle in his flat. Eli sometimes got so caught up in reading a book that he forgot to eat meals. His favorite food was sushi, but he also loved crepes and anything that he’d ever found in a bake shop. When he was a boy, he’d fallen off of his bike and cut a gash into his arm; the cut had healed funny, so there was a squashed-ring-shaped scar just below his wrist (he’d joked that it looked like a halo, and Crowley had thought that description fit rather well with Eli’s overall angelic appearance). Eli had never watched Golden Girls. He was asexual but romantically and aesthetically attracted to men. He’d never had his nails painted before, but he did get them manicured and buffed a couple times a month.

The more Crowley thought about it, the more he realized that he couldn’t possibly remember all of the little things that Eli had told him. In contrast, Crowley could count on both of his hands the things that he’d told Eli about himself.

After an hour or so, Eli had finally ushered the last of the old ladies out of his shop, and he closed and locked the front door with a sigh of relief. Crowley was leaning against one of the bookshelves, picking at the chipping black polish on his nails, and he looked up when Eli smiled at him.

“Dinner?”

“My favorite tea is chamomile,” Crowley said, the words leaving his mouth all in a rush and landing in a jumbled pile on the floor between himself and Eli.

The brightness of Eli’s grin made Crowley wish that he’d remembered to bring his sunglasses.

“Thank you.” Eli was standing a few feet away, well within arm’s reach, and Crowley became acutely aware of this distance when Eli started to reach for his hand. But a sort of shadow flickered over Eli’s face and he dropped his hand back to his side, his fingers never even so much as brushing Crowley’s. “What would you like for dinner?”

Things continued in this way for weeks. Every day after work, Crowley would go to Eli’s shop or Eli would come to Crowley’s, and they would have dinner and talk. Sometimes they drank (it happened more often at Crowley’s flat than in Eli’s backroom, but Eli started being very careful about watching his intoxication levels and never got any further than tipsy), but most of the time, they fell back into the usual routine of Eli talking and Crowley listening.

When Crowley remembered, he’d tell Eli something about himself. He liked dark chocolate better than milk. He was allergic to pet dandruff, but he’d always wanted to get a snake. His first kiss was with a girl. He painted his nails because it helped calm him down. The things he shared were never hard ones, really, and they didn’t ever feel important, but the way Eli smiled at him afterward changed them. They went from being ordinary things to things that were a bit shiny around the edges, and they quickly became some of the things that Crowley liked most about himself.

Strange, that.

Sometimes, Eli would forget himself and touch Crowley. The split-second moments where Eli’s hand landed on Crowley’s forearm or shoulder or knee were burned into Crowley’s memory, filed in his brain next to the sound of Eli’s laugh or the way Eli smiled at strangers. But Eli’s hand was always gone as quickly as it came. Sometimes there was a lame excuse and sometimes there wasn’t, but Eli’s eyes always went darker with sadness for a moment. And Crowley, as cowardly as always, never grabbed Eli’s hand and held it there. He never told Eli to stay.

One night, they were sitting in the backroom of the bookshop, talking about the worst book-to-film adaptations that Eli had ever seen (Crowley was jumping in to defend a few of the movies that he’d seen and enjoyed, and Eli seemed to like sparring with him about that).

When Eli had brought up the 2013 adaptation of _The Great Gatsby_, Crowley had actually propped himself up on his elbows to get into a better arguing position - he’d felt a bit disadvantaged when he’d been lying down completely, and for some reason, this new half-reclined position felt a bit more defensible - and was halfway into a rant about how the movie had actually been better than most people thought when he realized that Eli had stopped interrupting and was staring at him.

“What?” he snapped, and the smile he hadn’t even been aware had crept onto his face disappeared.

Eli’s face fell a bit. “Sorry, I just… you were smiling.”

“I’ve smiled before,” Crowley said, hoping that Eli would let it go and not push any further.

“Not like that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He did, of course, know exactly what Eli was talking about. He hadn’t realized that he’d started to smile, which meant that he hadn’t corrected his smile. Eli had seen his real one, the one he never showed to anyone. Crowley hated his smile, and the fact that Eli had made him forget himself long enough to show it was more than a little irritating.

Eli wasn’t letting go, though. He’d caught onto a loose brick in Crowley’s emotional walls and was tugging on it with all of his bodyweight, trying to pull it out and peek through the hole.

So, he looked Crowley in the eye and said, “I think you have a beautiful smile, Crowley,” and Crowley stopped breathing.

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not. I like your smile.”

Crowley could feel his cheeks growing hot, so he turned his face away from Eli and stared at the ceiling. “No one likes my smile, Eli. It’s lopsided and gives my face weird dimples.”

“I _like_ it,” Eli said again, more emphatically this time. “Would you please shut up and take a compliment?”

Crowley snapped his mouth shut, teeth clicking together. It took him a moment to get his thoughts together, but he finally was able to force out a strained “Thank you,” and he felt rather than saw Eli’s face break into a beaming grin.

“You’re welcome. That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“Ngh,” said Crowley.

Eli laughed. “Anyway. The movie was just filmed so strangely, and they lost _all_ the romance-”

Pleased that Eli had changed the subject back, Crowley levered himself back onto his elbows and cut Eli off. “There is no romance, Eli, that’s the whole point…”

*********

Crowley walked into The Quill and Ink on a Friday afternoon, fingers playing with the seams on the inside of his pockets. A few Saturdays back, he’d gone to St. James’s with Eli and Anathema, and he was wondering if Eli might be interested in doing that again. He’d gotten to draw while Eli had fed the ducks and chatted with Anathema, and it had been a good way for Crowley to be around Eli without having to make any attempt at conversation and risk saying something stupid.

Stepping into the middle of the shop, Crowley was about to call for Eli when he heard that wonderful laugh echo out from somewhere between the shelves. Silently, he slipped down an empty row, following the sound of Eli’s lilting voice.

He found Eli leaning against the wall, deep in conversation with the same smooth-talking older American gent who’d been in six or so weeks before. Neither of them were holding any books; Eli’s hands were folded together at his waist, and the American’s hand was resting on the wall a few inches away from Eli’s head.

Crowley saw red. Apparently, seven weeks was enough time for Eli to move on from a breakup, and he’d moved on to _this_ bastard.

Part of Crowley wanted to walk up, yank the American bloke away from Eli, punch him in the face, and shove him out of the door, but he knew that Eli would never forgive him for that. As quietly as he had come, Crowley walked out and leaned against one of the pillars in the open space in the front of the shop. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when the bloke left, but he was quickly deciding that he needed to do something.

After five or so minutes, Crowley heard the American’s rumbling voice getting closer, and he tensed, digging his nails into the palms of his hands.

“Would you be open to having a drink with me sometime?” The American stepped out of the rows of bookcases, closely followed by Eli, who had his back to Crowley.

Eli chuckled, and Crowley felt like slamming his own head into the corner of the nearest table.

“Sometime, yes.” The jealous fire that had ignited in Crowley’s belly was blazing, now, and his fists tightened even further.

The smug-faced bloke smiled his too-perfect smile and pulled out his mobile phone. “Good. Let’s find a time that works, okay?”

“Yes,” Eli said again as he typed his number into the man’s sleek smartphone.

Instantly, the memory of Eli doing the same thing with Seaghan’s phone flew into Crowley’s head, and Seaghan’s words of warning once more echoed in his mind. _“If you don’t, another me will come along, and maybe this one will stick around.”_ This bloke looked nothing like Seaghan, but he was still stepping in and doing what Crowley was too much of a coward to do, and that was resemblance enough.

Crowley cleared his throat for no reason other than to see the look on Eli’s face when he realized that there had been an audience to that whole encounter. Predictably, Eli nearly dropped his new date’s phone as he whipped around, apology already on his lips.

“So sorry, I didn’t hear anyone come in, I’ll be with you in- oh. Crowley, hello.”

“Hi,” Crowley said, forcing his mouth into his carefully-constructed smile. Ever since Eli had complimented his smile, Crowley had been making an effort to do it more, but only when it was just himself and Eli. He didn’t want anyone else seeing it. It felt strangely intimate, somehow, like his smile was under Eli’s possession, and that should have scared him, but it didn’t.

Eli noticed the absence of Crowley’s real smile, and the joy on his face flickered a little. To Crowley’s horror, Eli’s soft cheeks were red with the same blush that had been there when he’d agreed to go out with Seaghan, and Crowley found himself wishing that he could be the one to put that blush there someday.

“Friend of yours?” The American was eyeing Crowley warily, looking him up and down with the type of judgmental air that usually preceded a snide comment about the permanency of tattoos or the ridiculous need that some people felt to cover up their God-given bodies. Crowley had seen it before, so he braced himself for the onslaught of prejudicial comments.

Luckily, Eli stepped between them and started making introductions. “Yes, sorry. Jason, this is my friend, Crowley. Crowley, this is Jason.”

“Hello,” Jason said with feigned politeness. “Nice to meet you.”

“Mmm,” Crowley replied, earning himself a withering glare from Eli (one which he knew meant _be-polite-please-Crowley_).

An awkward sort of silence settled over the room, and Eli fidgeted uncomfortably with his too-large tweed blazer.

“Right,” Jason finally said. “I’ll call you later, Eli. Goodbye, Crowley.”

Eli followed Jason to the door, flipping the sign to _“Closed”_ and locking it, his body positioned in such a way that he couldn’t see Crowley at all. Crowley had the sneaking suspicion that this was intentional, and he could see the tightness in Eli’s shoulders as he turned around.

Crowley didn’t say anything at first, just watched Eli bustle around the shop, tidying up the counter and closing down the register and shutting down his computer. Eli was always talking, and he had a tendency to get even more chatty when he was anxious, so the silence that was still filling the room was wildly out of character. Eli carefully avoided looking at Crowley, too, so Crowley knew that he would have to be the one to break the silence.

“Jason seems _friendly_,” Crowley finally said, spitting out the last word like it was burning his tongue.

“He is.”

“Going out with him, then?” He knew he was being petty, and he knew he had absolutely no right to be as jealous as he was, but he couldn’t stop himself. Seeing Eli with another man (another _better-for-him man_, Crowley’s brain supplied helpfully) was doing funny things to Crowley’s self control, which was admittedly already limited when it came to Eli.

“Shouldn’t matter to you if I am.”

“It doesn’t,” Crowley lied.

“Good,” Eli said, finally raising his eyes to Crowley’s as he strode across the room to where Crowley was standing. “He really is quite a _nice_-”

And for some reason, that was what did it. Crowley took a step forward, fisted his hands in Eli’s hideous blazer, and pushed Eli up against the nearest wall. Eli’s dark eyes had gone wide, and his mouth was slightly parted in shock, but Crowley couldn’t find it in himself to care. So, before Eli could protest or get him to stop, Crowley bent his head and pressed his lips to Eli’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been waiting to write this last scene for longer than you all can possibly know.


	10. Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath of the kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I've finally climbed back aboard the Softness Train. It'll be pretty soft and lovely from here on out (with spots of angsty stuff because emotional issues do NOT fix themselves overnight), so I hope you're ready for it! Just an FYI: this chapter is almost pure dialogue, so I hope it flows well!
> 
> Thanks for all of the lovely support you've given me. Y'all's comments and kudos seriously brighten my day. Please feel free to reach out to me here on on Tumblr whenever you'd like! I do my best to reply. Also, don't ever hesitate to share or rec any of my stories; they're yours as much as they are mine (but if you copy a piece, please give me credit)!
> 
> I love you all very much and wish you the best of adventures in coming days. 
> 
> Warnings for language and discussions of drunkenness.

For two and a half seconds, Crowley forgot that there was anything more to the world than the scratchiness of Eli’s blazer under his hands and the heat of Eli’s body against his and _oh, fuck_ the softness of Eli’s lips under his. For two and a half seconds, the world spun backwards and flew off its axis. For two and a half seconds, Crowley kissed Eli, and Eli kissed him back.

And then Eli’s hands were on Crowley’s chest and Crowley was stumbling backwards, and everything about the world went back to normal again.

Except it hadn’t gone back to normal, really. Not at all. Because Crowley had lost all of his sanity and dignity and self-control and had _kissed Eli with no warning_. He’d kissed him because he was jealous and because he wanted to, and Eli had taken a quarter of a second to be shocked before kissing Crowley back like he’d been waiting his entire life to do it.

But now Eli was standing a few feet away, still pressed against the wall, staring at Crowley with too-wide eyes and a slightly-pinker-than-normal mouth, and he looked the opposite of happy.

“You can’t _do_ that, Crowley!”

Crowley’s mouth dropped open. “Look, I know I should’ve asked, but-”

“_No_,” Eli said forcefully. “I mean, yes, you should’ve asked, but that’s not what I’m talking about. You can’t kiss me, Crowley. I don’t work like you do.”

“And how do I work?”

“You can kiss people without putting emotions behind it,” Eli snapped, and Crowley’s heart broke through his ribcage and threw itself onto the floor. “I can’t do that.”

“That wasn’t- I wasn’t- I have emotions!”

Eli still hadn’t moved, but he crossed his arms over his chest. “Oh? So that kiss was emotional, then, was it?”

Crowley ground his teeth so hard that he bit his lip. When he finally managed to spit out a “Yes,” the word tasted like blood.

When Eli laughed, it was a hollow sound, and Crowley flinched. “I don’t believe you.”

“I’m telling the fucking truth!”

“You told me that you don’t do relationships, Crowley,” Eli retorted, dark eyes flashing. “You said that they’re too complicated, that they involve too many emotions that you don’t want to get tangled up in. I know you go out with people, though, because you’ve mentioned it when you’re drunk; I asked An about it, and she said you never see the same person twice. You can kiss and dance and drink, but you can’t do more than that.”

A bright red flush filled Crowley’s cheeks. “I _don’t_ do more than that, yeah.”

In hindsight, Crowley should definitely have qualified that statement with something like “but I want to try with you.” He really should have gone further than that and said, “I want to kiss you for more than one night, and I want to look at you in the light and not just in the darkness of nightclubs and dirty alleys. I’d like to try this whole dating-you thing, if you’d let me.” But he said none of that because he didn’t want to give in too easily, didn’t want to run wrecking balls through all of his emotional walls at once.

This was evidently the wrong decision.

Eli pushed himself away from the wall, walking toward Crowley with quick, heavy steps. He came to a stop with his chest mere inches from Crowley’s, and he looked up with his jaw set in defiance. His dark eyes were hard and sharp around the edges, and Crowley felt a tingle of fear run up his spine.

“Then what the _fuck_ are you still doing here?”

Crowley had never heard Eli curse before, and he knew that he wasn’t likely to do it again, but that wasn’t the most important part of what had just been said. Eli had, for all intents and purposes, just thrown his white gauntlet down at Crowley’s black-leather-clad feet. The gauntlet had writing crawling up the side that said, _Want me, _really_ want me, or leave me alone._

Almost as if he’d read Crowley’s mind, Eli poked Crowley in the chest, fire still blazing in his eyes, and spoke with the same harshness as before.

“You can’t not want me and also not want anyone else to want me.” It was a shout, nearly, and the force of it hit Crowley’s chest like a punch to the sternum. Eli dropped his eyes to the floor, his face as red as Crowley’s. His entire body was shaking as he tried to catch his breath, and when he spoke again, his voice was rough. “You can’t do that. You _can’t_.”

“Who says I don’t want you?” The gauntlet had done something to him, apparently, because his walls were crumbling faster than he could possibly hope to repair them, and so a little bit of his real feelings slipped out of places where stone used to stand.

“You do,” Eli said, some of the defiance creeping back into his voice. “You, Mr. I-Don’t-Do-Relationships-Or-Emotions, _you_ say that you don’t want me like I want you.”

Crowley could tell that he was losing Eli. This was why he’d avoided this whole situation in the first place, but it was also why he’d decided to do something about it. It was the paradox of loss, and Crowley was feeling it in a new way for the first time. If you don’t give someone the truth, you’ll lose them, and if you do, you might lose them anyway. He didn’t know what to say, but he knew he had to say something, so he just started talking.

“I’m jealous, okay? I’m jealous that you flirt with handsome blokes who walk into your shop. I was jealous that Seaghan got to kiss you and hold you and call you his. I’m jealous that you fancied him, and I’m jealous that you fancy Jason. I’ve never _been_ jealous before, not like this. I’ve never cared enough to be. So that’s why I kissed you, okay? _Fuck_.”

“Jealous,” Eli repeated slowly, the muscles in his jaw tightening even further beneath the softness of his face. “You kissed me because you were jealous.”

“Yes.” Crowley knew he’d admitted it, but his voice still caught on his affirmation. Every single alarm bell in his head was blaring and flashing, screaming at him to get out of this situation before he got hurt, begging him to cut Eli out of his life. His legs were itching to run, his arms aching to push past Eli and open the door and never look back. But Crowley crushed it down, swallowing his fear with big gulps of oxygen.

And then Eli looked him in the eyes again and said, “You’re not allowed to be jealous.”

Crowley spluttered, searching for a way to respond to that. “Wh- how d’you- I’m not- I’m not _allowed_? The fuck? Who’s gonna allow me, Eli? You?”

“You can’t be jealous because I’m not _yours_, Crowley!”

Everything around Eli went dark for a moment. All that Crowley could see was Eli’s heaving chest and shaking hands and the splotchy redness in his cheeks. All that he could hear was the quiver in Eli’s voice and the sound of Eli’s breaths coming ragged and rough. All that he could smell was old books and clean cologne, and nothing else mattered.

So, in another moment of impulsive, non-thinking, idiotic, and yet somehow also perfectly necessary abandon, Crowley asked a question that he’d never thought he’d say to someone.

“What if I want you to be?”

Eli blinked at him. “What?”

When Crowley had imagined asking Eli to give him a chance romantically, this was not how he had thought it would go. He’d thought that he might bring it up over wine or coffee, something lighthearted and easy enough to get out of if Eli said no. When he’d dreamed about this moment, he’d thought that he would be suave and collected, and he’d imagined Eli’s blush and shy smile, and that had been perfect. He hadn’t wanted to sound needy or desperate. He’d wanted it to be everything that Eli deserved.

But, because things with Crowley hardly ever went according to plan, desperation had clung to every syllable of his question, and Eli hadn’t said yes. He hadn’t said no, either, but he definitely hadn’t said yes.

So, with the ruins of his half-made plans and hopeful dreams at his feet, Crowley repeated himself, ready to run when Eli told him to go.

“What if I want you to be mine?” Realizing how possessive that sounded, Crowley backtracked. “Not like I… I dunno, not ‘mine’ like I _own_ you or something, but like…” Crowley trailed off, steeling himself to say the word he dreaded, “...like a relationship, ‘mine.’”

The rigidity in Eli’s body lessened slightly, but his eyes stayed impenetrably hard. Then, very slowly, Eli repeated Crowley again, voice flat and devoid of emotion.

“You want to be in a relationship with me.”

Crowley ignored the slimy feeling of fear that was creeping around in his mind at the sound of that sentence and nodded. “I’d like to try.”

The nine and a quarter seconds that followed were the longest in Crowley’s entire life. The silence stretched between Eli’s mouth and his ears, stringy like pulled taffy, and Crowley’s heartbeat was so loud that he was surprised the shop wasn’t shaking with the rhythm of it.

“I need a cup of tea,” Eli said, and he trudged off toward the back of the shop.

Stunned, Crowley let him go, and he stared at the empty space where Eli had just been standing, trying to process what had just happened. He hadn’t gotten an answer. In every single version of events that he’d gone through in his head, good or bad, Eli had at least given him an answer.

Due to the sudden clamminess of his palms, Crowley was discovering that he didn’t know what to do without one, and he was teetering on the edge of a panic attack when he heard Eli’s steady footfalls behind him.

“Are you coming, then?” The anger was gone from Eli’s voice, and a little of his usual smile was touching the corner of his lips. He wasn’t exactly happy - Crowley would have known if he was; they were around each other often enough - but he didn’t seem upset anymore, either.

From its position on the floor, Crowley’s heart gave a hopeful pound and leaped back into his chest, and Crowley followed Eli through the maze of bookshelves.

Like a second shadow, he kept following Eli all the way up the creaky stairs into Eli’s (somewhat messy and unsurprisingly book-filled) flat, through the sitting room, and into the kitchen. Neither of them said a word to one another until the water had been boiled and the tea had been poured into two chipped white mugs.

Crowley was still standing when Eli slid a cup of tea across the table to him and said, “Sit down, please. You’re making me nervous.”

_I’m making him nervous,_ Crowley thought to himself, a wry smile twisting itself across his face without his permission. _Oh, the irony in that fucking statement._ But he sat, and Eli flashed him a quick smile before taking a sip of his tea.

“So,” Eli said. “You want to give relationships a try.”

“Not relationship_s_,” Crowley corrected. “A relationship. One.”

“With me.”

“Yeah.”

Eli was X-Ray Stare-ing the hell out of Crowley over the rim of his mug. “Why?”

Crowley shrugged. “Because I want to.” It was a vague answer, sure, but it was true, so he hoped that Eli would take it and move along with the conversation. The big question was still unanswered, and that was starting to gnaw a little at Crowley’s insides.

“That’s not good enough, Crowley.”

“What’s with the interrogation?” Crowley’s patience was beginning to wear a bit thin around the edges. He’d worked up the courage to _do_ something about his feelings, and Eli was refusing to give him a straight answer. It was infuriating.

Eli stirred his tea again. He didn’t have to, but Crowley knew why he was doing it: it gave him somewhere else to look while he thought about a way to phrase his answer.

“I need to make sure that you’re not going to call me tonight or come into the shop tomorrow and say that you’ve changed your mind,” Eli said softly. “If you’ve suddenly decided that you want this, you can just as suddenly decide that you don’t.”

Something ugly reared its head in Crowley’s gut, and he swallowed down the bile that had risen in his throat. Apparently, Eli was just as afraid of this as he was, and he wasn’t sure whether or not that knowledge was comforting.

“I’m not going to decide I don’t want this,” Crowley said. “Because I _do_. I do want this.”

“Why, though?” Crowley flinched, but Eli soldiered on. “You’ve never wanted to have a romantic relationship before. What’s changed?”

“You,” Crowley said before he could stop himself. “I just… I’m around you a lot, and every second of that time, I just want to kiss you. When we go for dinner, I want to pay. I want you to be able to spend the night at mine if you want. I want-”

“A relationship,” Eli finished. “Right. But you understand that what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense, right? You’ve never wanted any of this with anyone else.”

Groaning, Crowley laid his head down on the table and said, “I know.”

“But you do now.”

“Yes.”

“Because of me.”

“Mmm.”

“And you can’t explain why that is?”

“No.”

“You can’t even try?”

With a sigh, Crowley raised his head and propped it on top of his brightly-colored forearm. “All I know is that usually when I think I might start - I don’t know, feeling? - I can shut it off. And I tried with you, I really did, but it just… didn’t work.”

“Oh,” Eli said, and he was smiling, and Crowley’s lungs forgot how to help him breathe.

“I’m going to be bad at this,” Crowley blurted. Fair warning was due, really.

Eli kept grinning at him and said, “Okay. I’ll help you.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“I do.”

“You don’t have to do this.” Crowley didn’t know why he was giving Eli an out, really, other than that he wanted Eli to be sure. He’d never done this before, and he was certain that if things went sideways, it would be his fault, so he needed to know that Eli wasn’t choosing this out of pity. “You can date Jason, if you want. I’ll stay out of your way, I promise. You should be with someone… well, someone you fancy.”

“I fancy _you_, you daft idiot,” Eli said with a sort of forceful kindness that made Crowley’s brain short-circuit and go dark.

“You do?”

“_Yes_, of course!”

“Ah,” Crowley said, and then he was smiling his crooked and too-wide smile, and Eli started laughing.

With his smile still stuck on his face like it had been glued there, Crowley watched Eli laugh and thought that he’d never seen anything quite so beautiful in his entire life.

“Dinner?” Eli asked when he finally quit laughing, his cheeks still wonderfully pink from lack of oxygen.

“Ngh,” Crowley said, smile morphing into a smirk. “Hey, Eli - d’you think you might want to go on a date with me?” The word still felt unfamiliar and clunky in his mouth, the corners of the letters cutting little slices into his tongue, but Crowley was fine with that. He’d get used to it. He’d have to.

“I rather think I would, yes.”

As fate would have it, Eli was craving fish and chips, and so they went to the same chippie that they’d been to the first time that Crowley had asked Eli to dinner. They ordered the same things that they’d gotten the last time, and there was a similar sort of awkward silence that settled over the table. After a few minutes of not talking (mixed in with a fair amount of stealing glances at one another and looking quickly away before remembering that they could do that now), Crowley found himself growing frustrated. He knew Eli, and Eli knew him. They were family. They talked all the time. Eli knew more about him than possibly anyone else in the world, and yet for some insane reason, Crowley had no idea what to talk about.

While Crowley was working himself into a full-on frenzy over the silent status of their first date, Eli was calmly sprinkling salt onto his chips, his usual soft smile on his lips. That was a happy smile, Crowley knew, and it confused him.

On one of the occasions when they looked up at each other at the same time, Eli saw the panic on Crowley’s face, and his smile faltered. “Crowley? Are you alright?”

“We aren’t talking,” Crowley mumbled into his basket of chips. “Why is this so… _different_? It shouldn’t be. I don’t like that it’s different.”

“First dates are always a little bit awkward,” Eli explained, setting down the piece of fried fish that was falling apart in his hand. “It doesn’t matter how well you know the person, that’s just the way these things go.”

“I don’t like it,” Crowley said again, and Eli chuckled.

“First first date, then?”

Eli hadn’t intended it to be a teasing remark, and Crowley knew that, but it still stung. Slouching a bit, Crowley turned to look out the window, an unwanted blush burning its way across his face. It wasn’t that Eli was wrong, exactly, but he wasn’t entirely right, either. Crowley had been on a lot of first dates. In fact, he’d been on _exclusively_ first dates, and they’d all looked similar - dark places, loud music, too much to drink. He’d been on countless dates, but they were firsts only inasmuch as Crowley never intended for there to be seconds. So, no, he’d never been on a proper first date. Twenty-six years of life, and no first date experience to speak of.

So, with perhaps more defensiveness than was warranted, Crowley said, “Yeah, you could say that.”

“I’m not making fun,” Eli said gently, and then there was a warm pressure on Crowley’s hand, and he snapped his head back to look at it.

Eli, clever and kind bastard that he was, had set his hand on top of Crowley’s. The last time he’d done that, Crowley had pulled his hand away and shut him out. Every muscle and bone in Crowley’s arm and hand was itching to do that now, to retreat behind his walls. Somehow, that little touch made things more concrete, and instead of shrinking, Crowley’s panic grew.

He stared at Eli’s hand on his, just looked at the soft pale pinkness of Eli’s skin and the perfect shape of Eli’s nails. He could just barely see the tips of black polish on his own pinky and thumb, and he saw where his skin changed from olive-toned to metallic grey, from bare skin to inked tattoo. Opposites, really, their hands, and it made Crowley dizzy.

But he didn’t pull away, even though his hand twitched under Eli’s. Instead, he looked up, breathing unsteady, and allowed himself to get lost in the way Eli was looking at him.

For a minute, Crowley wasn’t sure how to categorize that look. Eli’s smile was there, still as soft and lovely and bright as normal, but there was something new in his eyes. It clicked, eventually, and Crowley drew in an involuntary gasp.

Affection. Pure, unadulterated, unchecked affection. That was new, seeing that.

Just as Crowley had managed to get his breathing somewhat under his control again, Eli said, “You know, I quite like that I get to be your first date. Bit possessive of you myself, it would seem,” and Crowley found himself right back where he’d started.

“Angh,” he said, and Eli beamed at him before turning back to the chips and fish that had gone cold in front of him. He didn’t complain, though, just let his hand stay on top of Crowley’s while he finished his meal. For his part, Crowley didn’t eat anything else; he just sat and watched Eli, blushing when Eli winked at him and letting Eli’s hand stay on his.

It was strange, but when they started walking back to the bookshop, the conversation that had been missing from dinner started up again. While they walked, their arms swung freely, occasionally bumping into each other. Every time that happened, Crowley savored the feeling of Eli’s skin on his, and by the time they stopped in front of Eli’s shop, he had a full mental diary full of touches and brushes and taps.

They stood together in the glow of the streetlights, Crowley leaning against the doorpost as Eli finished telling him about the woman who’d come in searching for a book that she didn’t know the name or author of. Smiling, Crowley looked at Eli as he talked, taking in the way that his arms waved when he was excited, making mental notes of the way the light caught in Eli’s white curls, memorizing the shape of Eli’s face, cataloguing details (Eli’s bowtie was crooked, and the dimple on his right cheek was deeper than the left one, and he was _beautiful_).

Really, the whole thing was just as easy and comfortable as it always was, and Crowley had the funny feeling that absolutely nothing had changed.

He wasn’t wrong, really. Nothing _had_ changed, except for the fact that absolutely everything had. Crowley became very aware of the ‘everything’ portion when Eli stopped talking, jumped up onto his tip-toes, pulled Crowley’s head down, and kissed him.

For the second time in a day, Crowley forgot that there was anything more to the world than Eli Fell and the way it felt to kiss him. But this time when Eli pulled away and the world was normal again, Crowley thought that it was really a very good thing.

When Crowley got home, he tried to sleep, but he couldn’t shut his mind off. So, he made his way over to his desk and pulled out the purple sketchbook and a pencil. In the quiet hours of the morning, Crowley drew Eli laughing, and when he’d finished, he wrote one word in his tiny, cramped handwriting beneath it. The word made his chest feel like it was too small to hold his heart, and while the alarms and warning bells were still ringing in his head, Crowley focused on the word and forcibly shut them off.

It was there in scratchy graphite, scribbled below a sketch of Crowley’s first-ever romantic partner, and it made things feel a little bit alright even though his whole anti-romantic life plan had been poured down the drain.

_Mine_.


	11. Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eli finally asks for the drawing Crowley promised him, a shy girl makes an interesting tattoo request, and there is a big mess involving crepes and kisses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello!!
> 
> So, just a heads up: this chapter contains a lot of Crowley-being-a-dumb-self-deprecating-idiot. When he is told that he is better than he thinks, he is still a walnut who doesn't know how to deal with Feelings. 
> 
> (honestly, my warning tag for this whole story should be "Crowley builds a lot of walls, and when they fall down, he falls with them") 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this chapter!! Hugs and love to all of you. 
> 
> Warnings for language and self-deprecating thoughts. Also, warnings for intense softness.

Crowley was staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror, pencil hovering just above a blank page of his sketchbook. He was all angles, really - sharp jaw, defined cheekbones, pointier-than-normal ears, collarbones that stuck out a bit too far. His skin was a sort of pale olive color, which meant that it would probably be darker if he lived somewhere other than a small island that sat under consistent cloud cover eight months of the year. His mother’s side was Italian by blood (hence “Anthony”), but you wouldn’t guess from looking at him because he had his father’s green eyes and lighter skin.

The longer he spent looking in the mirror, the stranger he felt. He could see his mother in his skin (the few parts of it that were free of colored ink, anyway), his nose, and his hair. His father watched him with his own eyes and frowned at him from his own lips. Even though they’d decided to leave him behind, it still felt odd to see pieces of them in the mirror. They’d chosen a life without him, so Crowley wanted them to leave him alone. But unfortunately, due to a little thing called _fucking genetics_, they never would. They couldn’t, really, no matter how hard they tried. They would always be there in the mirror, in little glimpses of his face in puddles and car windows, and Crowley hated that.

Normally when Crowley sat down to draw something, he’d divide it into its basic shapes and lines, but doing that to himself felt wrong. It was like he’d taken himself out of his body, was looking at it from above, and then had to disassemble it piece by piece and put it back together again with his hands and a pencil. There was a reason he didn’t do self-portraits, and this was it. It made him see things that he tried to hide under piercings and large swatches of brightly-colored skin and fake smiles, and when he saw those things, he hated them.

But Eli had asked for this, and Crowley had promised to do it, and so he would. He’d do it if it killed him, if it broke him, because he had the feeling that Eli would know how to put him back together again.

They’d been sitting together on the sofa in Eli’s backroom when it had come up. Crowley had been sitting more upright than he could ever remember sitting in his life, spine virtually straight up-and-down except where it bent a bit to allow his head to rest on Eli’s shoulder. Eli had been smiling at him for no reason at all, just looking at him out of the corner of his eye, when his face had fallen sober far too quickly for it to be normal.

Crowley’s thoughts immediately went to the worst possible scenarios. They’d only been dating for two days - maybe Crowley was going too fast for him? Maybe he should sit up, scooch back to the other end of the sofa, and pretend like he wasn’t thinking about being close to Eli every second of every day. Maybe he should have waited for Eli to make the move to touch him again. They’d only kissed twice, and when Eli had come over to Crowley’s flat the night before, they hadn’t even so much as held hands.

Eli must have seen the fear in Crowley’s eyes because he reached out and rested his hand very gently on Crowley’s trembling thigh. “Please don’t move. You’re perfectly fine where you are.”

“You sure?” Crowley hated how much his voice was shaking.

“Quite sure,” Eli said, rubbing small circles over Crowley’s knee with his thumb. “I wasn’t sure whether you’d want me to initiate physical contact - you’ve not done this before, so you’re driving, here. You set the pace.”

“I don’t want to,” Crowley said quickly. “You know what you’re doing, so _you_ set the pace.”

Eli considered this, thumb still drawing swirls into the denim of Crowley’s trousers. Beneath his touch, Crowley’s leg was growing warm, but he didn’t mind. He liked it, sort of, this uncomfortable full-body flush that happened whenever Eli touched him. It was new, and he thought it was good.

“You’ll let me know if I ever do anything you’re not ready for?”

Crowley’s laugh was squeaky with nerves. “Eli, I’m not ready for any of this.”

“If I scare you, I mean,” Eli clarified, and Crowley laughed again, the truth leaving his mouth in a twisted clump of five syllables.

“You terrify me.”

“Why?”

Crowley had made great strides in communicating his feelings on the day he’d told Eli that he wanted to try a relationship, but the answer to this particular question was too much for him to unpack. Too much, too fast, too fragile. So, Crowley shrugged and nestled a little closer into Eli’s shoulder, bending more of his body and relaxing into the softness of Eli’s side.

A low chuckle rumbled through Eli’s chest, and Crowley could feel it against his ear. He shifted his head a bit to look up and found Eli looking down at him. He stayed that way for a minute or so, watching Eli watch him, and he was once more overcome with the realization that Eli was possibly the most beautiful thing in the universe. Better than all the Monets in every museum combined, better than empty streets after the first snow of the season, better than galaxies and supernovas and nebulae. Just _better_.

Just as Crowley was thinking that Seaghan was the dumbest man alive for giving this up, the same sober look crossed Eli’s soft face again, and Crowley could feel the fear settle back into his chest like a block of ice.

“Do you know,” Eli began slowly, “I never asked you for that drawing you promised me.”

“I know,” Crowley said, because he did know. He’d thought that Eli had forgotten.

“I know what I’d like, I think.”

“Yeah?”

Eli’s smile was one of the ones that made Crowley’s brain become suddenly incapable of higher functions, which is why it took Crowley a moment to respond when Eli said, “You. I’d like you to draw me a portrait of you.”

Crowley stared at him. “What?”

“I’d like to have a drawing of you,” Eli repeated, his fingers still moving in smooth patterns across Crowley’s leg.

“Okay,” Crowley said. He’d already agreed, and he wouldn’t say no. He didn’t want to do it, but Eli wanted him to, so he would.

This is why Crowley found himself scratching angry lines into his sketchbook a week after Eli had placed his request, digging the point of his pencil in the fibers of the page and leaving dark marks on the white. Sharp jaw, cold eyes, too-thin arms and metal-pierced ears. He wouldn’t romanticize himself. The thing that Eli liked most about Crowley’s drawings was the realism, the “what there isn’t” of them, and so Crowley couldn’t change that now. He couldn’t take the monstrous shapes in the mirror and make them beautiful because it wouldn’t be honest. It wouldn’t be real.

It would be a lie, and he was tired of lying.

Crowley put the finishing touches on his self-portrait in the early hours of the morning and signed it with a flourish. He’d broken the tips off of two pencils and worn a third down to a nub, but it was done. His own face stared up at him from the page, hard and cold and _real_, and Crowley resisted the urge to tear it into bits and chuck it in the bin. Why Eli had asked for such a thing didn’t make any sense, but he’d asked, and so Crowley had done it.

Carefully, Crowley tore the page out of his sketchbook, using the edge of a metal ruler to keep the line straight. With precise motions, he rolled it into a loose scroll and tied a black ribbon around the middle, and he set it on his desk.

He went to bed but not to sleep. Even though he’d finished drawing, he still felt like he hadn’t quite settled back into his own body yet, still felt like he was hovering just above it, watching himself stare off into space.

With a sigh, Crowley folded his hands over his stomach, following the lines of ink on his arms with a careful eye. Dark blackish-blue cascaded in uneven drips down over a musical staff overlaid with lyrics written in curling red script on one arm, and red and blue lines stretched across the top of his chest and down his arm on the other, disappearing into a matrix of gears and broken metal sheeting. He loved that, the contrast between his two arms. One was fluid and organic, and the other was sharp and mechanical. Both were barriers of ink, but they looked very different, and he loved that he could do that.

Crowley’s tattoos were there for a reason that went beyond a fascination with art and color and shape. He loved tattoos because they were beautiful, but he also loved them because they were permanent. Crowley had never considered himself to be anything close to beautiful, so when he’d had the chance to change it, he had. He’d traced bright colors and vivid patterns over his skin, making them merge into one another. On his stomach, he’d written “WET PAINT” - he couldn’t see it under the sheets, but he knew it was there. It had been a joke, sort of, but it also served as a reminder that he could change things. He could keep coloring himself in if he wanted to, could keep filling in the gaps where his freckled olive skin peeked through. He could be unfinished forever if he wanted to be.

Someone had told Crowley that he was gorgeous, once, but that had been in a dark corner of a club that smelled of lager and sweat, and that someone had been working very hard (and failing, of course) to get Crowley to come home with them, so Crowley hadn’t counted it. He saw himself as something that needed fixing and changing, and no one had given him a reason to believe otherwise.

If Crowley had ever told anyone about his insecurities, there probably would have been a line of people who showed up to correct him. But he was Crowley, so he’d never said anything, and so no one had ever known that a correction was needed.

When Crowley finally fell asleep, he dreamed of burning his portrait, and when he woke in the morning, he was disappointed to see that it was still exactly where he’d left it. He let it lie there all day as he worked downstairs, and every time he got a break from consultations or appointments, he thought about going upstairs and chucking it away. He wanted so badly to start over, do it better, make it look like something that deserved a place on the wall of Eli’s study. But he knew that even if he tore the sketch to shreds and put pencil to paper once again, nothing would change. It would stay the same because Crowley drew the truth, and the truth would never be beautiful.

As Crowley’s luck would have it, the powers that be in the universe were not feeling particularly charitable towards him. His last walk-in consultation of the day was for a young lady who wanted a partial quote from St. Augustine on her shoulder blade. The girl was quiet, and she barely said so much as “Hello,” to Crowley before sliding a crinkled strip of paper across the table to him. He’d had to press her for her name - Edith - and she seemed disinclined to give him any more information than that.

“‘Love is the beauty of the soul,’” Crowley read, flicking his eyes up to the face of the person sitting across from him. “Right. What sort of thing do you want me to do with this? I don’t do any work unless you let me play with your idea a bit.”

The words on the page were rattling around in his head. They made quite a bit of painful sense to him, really, and they gave him an answer to a question he hadn’t even known he’d been asking. Everything Crowley had added to his body was beautiful, but he wasn’t, and he’d never really been sure of why.

And yet here was the answer, written in smudged green ink on the back of a chewing gum wrapper. He wasn’t beautiful because he didn’t really _love_. He’d let himself love a few times, but he’d been burned by it, and so he’d stopped. His love was partial, incomplete, hidden behind the same walls he’d spent his whole life building. Broken love equals broken beauty, and broken beauty isn’t really beauty at all.

When Edith started to talk, Crowley could barely hear her. Her voice was shaky and quiet, and Crowley found himself straining to catch what she was saying.

“Can you make it something colorful? Just… beautiful, like it says.”

“Just colorful?”

She kept staring at the table, never meeting his eyes. “Rainbow, maybe?”

_Oh_.

“Yeah,” Crowley said softly. “I can do that.”

Her eyes met his for a fraction of a second, but it was enough for Crowley to feel like his insides had been flash-frozen and microwaved. He’d only seen eyes that color on one other person, and that person was someone that Crowley was currently terrified of having and even more terrified of losing.

“You can?”

“Of course. Can you give me two weeks to work it out?”

Edith smiled at him, a shy sort of thing that slipped over her lips like water. “Yes.”

Crowley walked with her over to the computer and scheduled in an appointment, asking her for her last name. When she hesitated, Crowley gave his best attempt at a comforting smile and told her that he wouldn’t tell anyone. She finally told him, and when she left the shop, her Eli-like eyes were shining a bit brighter than they had been before.

She was brave, Crowley thought. Braver than he’d ever been. Someone in her life was making her feel like she couldn’t be herself, and so she’d taken matters into her own hands. A permanent mark on her body that no one could see unless she let them, something that she could have. Something that could be _hers_, something that no one could take away.

A beautiful thing born of heartbreak and pain. The words on the paper Edith had handed him were burned into his brain now, and he couldn’t let them go.

He knew that he should try to love again. Anathema told him that she loved him all the time, but he never said it back. The last time he’d said it had been to his father, a hurried last goodbye at the end of a phone call he wished he could forget had happened. But even before that, he’d let Anathema love him, and he’d never admitted that he loved her back.

Of course, Eli was part of his new family, but the implications of that weren’t anything that Crowley had ever seriously thought about. _“Families say ‘I love you,’”_ Eli had said that night, his words staunching the bleeding that had been making Crowley’s chest weak. But Eli couldn’t love him, not really. If he did, it was in the friend-family sort of way, not… not the other way.

And definitely did not love Eli the other way. It wasn’t possible. He didn’t do that.

Crowley was shaken from his thoughts by the sound of his phone buzzing on his desk, and he flipped it over to see a message from Eli.

“Shit,” Crowley said, scrambling to his feet and rushing up the stairs. He grabbed the stupid drawing from where it had been sitting and eating at his focus all day, ran a hand through his dark hair, and ran down the stairs. He was late for dinner. Eli was cooking, and he was late.

He reached the bookshop a few minutes later, the paper in his hand slightly more crumpled and sweaty than he’d have wanted, out of breath but only twelve minutes late. It occurred to him that this was the second time he’d had to run to Eli’s because he’d managed his time poorly, and he resolved to set some fucking alarms in the future.

The sound of the deadbolt unlocking drew Crowley’s attention back to the present. Eli’s head was the first thing that he saw, and he couldn’t help but smile a little. The already white-ish curls on Eli’s head were dusted with a layer of what appeared to be flour, and Eli’s cheeks were flushed (and also flour-covered, Crowley noted with amusement).

“Sorry,” Eli said, blushing a deeper shade of red when he noticed the teasing grin on Crowley’s face. “I was trying something new, and it… didn’t quite go as I had hoped.”

Crowley kept smiling at him, and when Eli swung the door open wider, Crowley forgot himself completely and _laughed_. Eli’s cream-colored jumper was coated in flour and smeared with some sort of red liquid, and he was only wearing one shoe (Crowley wasn’t even sure he _wanted_ to know what had happened to the other one), which meant that one of his hole-filled argyle socks was on full display.

Like most other things about himself, Crowley hated his laugh. It was rough and filled with gasps and snorts, and his face got red and splotchy rather too quickly because of it, so he’d trained himself out of it. When he thought something was funny, he’d smile (and if whatever was funny was with anyone other than Eli, he would give the toned-down version of his smile), but that was usually it. Sometimes, very rarely, Crowley would be nervous or angry enough to give some sort of a fucked-up laugh about something, but usually he managed to keep enough control of himself not to.

But here, standing in the fading sunlight on a street corner in Soho, Anthony Crowley let himself laugh, and something tight in his chest that he’d forgotten was there loosened. It felt remarkably good to laugh, and the answering nervous giggle from a blushing and food-caked Eli made things around him get a bit brighter.

So, because he’d had a hard day full of self-hatred and work and a complicated religious-and-gay client, Crowley kept laughing, skinny shoulders shaking and abs growing sore, watching Eli through the little gap between his eyelids.

Eli stopped laughing suddenly, his dark eyes wide and bright, and this made Crowley stop as well.

“What?” Crowley asked, knowing very well what.

“Get in here,” Eli said evenly, his sunbeam-bright grin creeping onto his face.

Crowley did as he was told and was immediately pushed up against the now-closed door and kissed by his very dusty and sweet-smelling significant other. He wasn’t expecting that, but he also wasn’t opposed to it, so he dropped the drawing onto the floor and cupped Eli’s cheeks, pulling him closer.

“The fuck was that for?” Crowley asked when Eli backed off, vision going a bit wonky at the sight of Eli’s kiss-reddened lips.

Eli smiled at him again and took his hand, lacing their fingers together (which they hadn’t done before, and _oh, that was very nice_).

“You laughed,” he said, and he pulled Crowley along toward the stairs to his flat.

That shouldn’t have been enough of an answer, but it was. It was a bit too much of an answer, really, because it meant that Eli knew Crowley well enough - and had been paying enough attention - to know that Crowley never let himself laugh. The fact that he commented on it meant that he understood that Crowley was comfortable enough to be more vulnerable than usual (like he had been with his sexuality and his smile), and it was really more of an expression of gratitude than anything else.

It also meant that Eli wanted Crowley to do it again, which was new. Not bad, but definitely scary.

By the time they got into the flat, Crowley still hadn’t managed more than a strangled “Nguh,” but Eli didn’t seem to mind.

Stepping into the kitchen un-knotted Crowley’s tongue, though, because he turned to Eli and asked, “What the bloody fucking hell happened in here?”

“I was trying to make dinner,” Eli sniffed defensively.

“_Trying_ being the operative word there, eh?”

“Oh, hush,” Eli said, blush rising in his cheeks again. “Yes, trying. I’m… not much of a cook.”

Crowley raised an eyebrow. “You wanted to do this.”

“I know.”

“But you know that you can’t cook.”

“Yes.”

“Why do it, then?”

“Because _I like you_, alright?” It was that same emphatically-happy tone that Eli had used before (_“I fancy_ you_”_), and Crowley knew better than to argue with it.

Still, he couldn’t let Eli go around thinking that he could just _say_ things like that, so Crowley hauled him in for another kiss.

“Feels different,” Crowley mumbled against Eli’s lips after a moment, eyes still closed. He was beginning to discover that kissing Eli had the same lip-loosening effect as drinking half a bottle of vodka.

“What does?”

“Kissing someone I like.”

“Oh.”

Suddenly very shy, Crowley scratched the back of his neck. “Yeah.”

“I’m going to kiss you again,” Eli said decidedly, and he did.

Unsurprisingly, Crowley didn’t have any objections, and it was a few long moments before they broke apart and turned to face the kitchen again.

“We should clean this up,” Crowley said, staring in confusion at what appeared to be a splotch of pancake batter on the ceiling.

“Rather,” Eli agreed.

They’d gotten five minutes into wiping down the counter and scrubbing strawberries and cream off of the floor when Crowley finally thought to ask the obvious question. “What were you trying to make, anyway?”

“Crepes,” Eli said sadly.

“It’s dinner.”

“I _know_ that, thank you. There’s nothing wrong with crepes for dinner.”

Crowley grinned at him from under the table. “If you say so.”

“I do,” Eli said primly.

“Come over to mine sometime, then,” Crowley said, scowling at a bit of strawberry syrup that had hardened on the floor. “I can cook - I’ll make you whatever frilly posh thing you like.”

Eli chuckled, and Crowley’s cheeks warmed. “You really are very sweet, you know.”

“Not.” He didn’t know why he was protesting, but it seemed necessary. He couldn’t just let Eli _do_ that, after all.

“Sweeter than strawberries, my dear.”

Crowley hit his head on the underside of the table in his hurry to stand up. “_What_?”

Eli helped him up from where he’d fallen to the floor and helped him to a chair. He felt around, soft fingers threading through Crowley’s hair, searching for the injured spot with the sort of fussy tenderness that made Crowley think of Anathema.

“Sorry,” Eli said, breathing a sigh of relief when he was satisfied that Crowley hadn’t come to any serious harm. “I called you ‘dear.’ Too fast?”

“No, just… neverbeencalledthatbefore.” Crowley winced, waiting for Eli to laugh, but the sound never came.

Instead, there was a light pressure on the top of his head, and it took him a second to realize that Eli had _kissed the top of his head_. Crowley had never been called ‘dear,’ and he’d never been kissed on the head by anyone other than his mum (and that had been when he was quite a lot younger and, y’know, in communication with his parents). It had been an all-around overwhelming forty-five seconds, and Crowley’s head was spinning.

“I’ll have to make a habit of it, then, dear,” Eli said again, turning back to his cleaning rag, evidently unaware that he’d just done the emotional equivalent of delivering a very firm uppercut to the bottom of Crowley’s ribcage.

“Hnngk,” Crowley said, and he was rewarded with the sound of Eli’s tinkling laughter.

The mess - which consisted of broken eggs, greasy butter wrappers, an exploded bag of flour, half a bowl of lumpy batter, a jar of strawberries-in-syrup that had somehow meandered its way down onto the floor, and various other assorted crepes accoutrements - took a while to clean, so Crowley had paused in his scrubbing of the tile to call for takeaway Chinese. They finished cleaning at approximately the same time as the delivery bloke rang the bell, so Crowley walked back into the flat with an armful of brown takeaway bags just as Eli finished throwing the dirty rags into the wash.

Crowley also had a roll of paper tucked into his back pocket. He’d kicked it when he’d gone to get the food, having forgotten all about it in the interest of kissing Eli and getting rid of the evidence of the Great Crepe Disaster. But now it was burning a hole in his pocket, so he handed it to Eli after dropping the bags of takeaway on the table.

“What’s this?”

“Your drawing.”

Eli’s dark eyes sparkled with excitement, so Crowley ducked his head and started tearing open the bags of food, the soft scratch of Eli’s nails on the paper drowning out everything else. Silently, Crowley served food for them both - dumplings and veggie fried rice for himself, potstickers and shrimp lo mein for Eli - waiting with his heart pounding in his throat for Eli to say something.

He couldn’t bring himself to look. He didn’t think he could handle seeing Eli’s disappointment when he realized what he’d asked for, didn’t want to see that horrified look turned onto him. Crowley didn’t want the fantasy to be over so quickly, but that was the unintentionally cruel thing about what Eli had asked for: it was a depiction of a monster, a drawing of the truth, and Crowley had wanted to pretend to be a man for just a little longer.

There was a little gasp from Eli’s side of the table, and Crowley forced himself to turn his head. Eli was staring at the drawing in his hands, forehead creased with wrinkles.

“I’m confused,” Eli said, his words like molasses. “I thought I asked for a picture of you.”

“That’s what you have, innit?” Crowley couldn’t keep the growl out of his voice. “Me, in all my honest glory.”

“This isn’t you.”

“It _is_, alright? It is.”

Eli was giving Crowley an especially piercing X-Ray Stare. Crowley averted his eyes again and slid Eli’s plate toward him. To his horror, he noticed that Eli still hadn’t let go of the drawing, and his stomach clenched like someone had driven a knife through it.

“I don’t see how this is you.”

“I looked in the mirror,” Crowley snarled through gritted teeth, “and I studied myself, and I drew what I saw. Just how you like, see - nothing fake. Just honest.”

The look on Eli’s face was impossible to read. His eyebrows were still pinched together in confusion, but the brightness had left his eyes. Crowley couldn’t stand to look at him, couldn’t bear to know that he’d been the one to put that pain in Eli’s eyes. Wiping his hands on his jeans, he turned toward the door. He’d gone and lost it - lost _him_ \- already, so he thought it would be better to just leave. Get out, get away, and get drunk.

And then there was a hot palm and five warm fingers wrapped around his elbow, and Crowley stopped.

“Come with me.”

“Where?”

Eli didn’t answer. He just looked up at Crowley with those sad, soft eyes and led him gently by the arm into the bedroom. They didn’t stay there long enough for Crowley to go into a panic because Eli continued on into the bathroom.

The lights came on, and Crowley flinched. He looked like a child after a scolding, tiny and afraid. In contrast, Eli was unusually authoritative, his grip on Crowley’s arm light but firm. In his other hand was the drawing, turned to face the mirror where Crowley could see it.

“Is… is this how you see yourself?” Eli’s voice was shaking.

“It’s how I am.” No oxygen was reaching Crowley’s lungs.

“No,” Eli said, releasing Crowley’s arm. Crowley wanted to run, but when he caught Eli’s gaze in the mirror, he found that he couldn’t get his legs to work. “It isn’t.”

“Eli, please-”

“Look at me.”

Crowley blinked at him. “What?”

“Look. At. Me.”

Still shaking, Crowley turned away from his reflection and looked Eli in the eye. He’d meant for it to be defiant, but it came off as something closer to pleading.

Eli softened. “There you are.”

The sound that flew from Crowley’s lips was something between a sob and a whimper. He didn’t know what was happening, and he wasn’t sure how to make it stop.

He also wasn’t sure that he wanted it to.

“What are we doing in here?”

“Looking,” Eli said, and turned Crowley to face the mirror. “Now. In your drawing, your eyes are cold. They’re not, see? They’re _warm_.” And then Eli’s finger brushed over Crowley’s eyelid, and Crowley’s heart started pounding cracks into the bones of his ribcage.

“Your nose is _lovely_.” The same finger made a warm trail down the bridge of Crowley’s nose.

“You didn’t draw your freckles, but I can see them.” Feather-light, Eli trailed three fingers over Crowley’s cheeks, causing an embarrassed flush of red to rise in Crowley’s cheeks. “They remind me of stars.”

“Shut up,” Crowley mumbled, but Eli’s fingers landed on his lips, and he stopped.

“I will not. You drew your lips too thin - they’re quite pretty, you see?”

Eli’s fingers brushed up the sides of Crowley’s face. “I’d give a lot of money to have a jaw like yours. And your ears - you drew them too large and too pointy, but they’re delicate. And-” Eli rose onto his toes and kissed the spot behind Crowley’s ear, and all of the words in Crowley’s brain crumbled into a pile of incoherent syllables “-they turn a wonderful shade of pink when I give you a compliment, like they are right now.”

Eli’s hands buried themselves in Crowley’s hair, and Crowley shivered. “You did well on the hair, actually. It’s _perfect_, though. Very soft.”

As Eli continued to give Crowley a tour of his own body, Crowley couldn’t make himself pull away. He couldn’t force his mouth to form the words of an argument because finally, finally, he was hearing things he’d always wanted to hear.

The part of Crowley that saw himself as ugly was issuing protests in his head, but Eli’s voice kept drowning them out.

_He’s lying,_ the voices said.

“You should hire someone to sculpt your torso, my dear. It’s beautiful.”

_Beautiful._ Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. It dawned on Crowley that Eli wasn’t talking about his tattoos or piercings. He wasn’t talking about the things that Crowley had changed about himself at all; he was only talking about the things that Crowley hated, the things he was born with. That was, in short, too much for Crowley to handle.

“No,” Crowley managed to choke out, but it was feeble.

“_Yes_,” Eli said, and his lips landed on Crowley’s shoulder. “You’re beautiful.” His hands moved down and slid into Crowley’s, and he wrapped his soft body around Crowley’s thin one. “Please tell me you can see that.”

“Nnn,” Crowley croaked, and for some reason that made Eli spin him around and kiss him on the lips.

The kiss broke the last bit of composure in Crowley’s heart, and so he was dismayed but not surprised when he felt hot tears fall to his cheeks, sliding down over his lips and into Eli’s mouth. Eli didn’t stop kissing him, though, just pulled him closer, grabbing him by the front of his black (and now flour-dusted) vest top.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered again, and Crowley’s knees nearly gave out.

And then Eli asked if he could burn the portrait Crowley had made, and because Crowley’s mouth still hadn’t regained the ability to form words, Crowley kissed him instead.


	12. Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A series of first times and Good Things for Crowley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter gave me SO MUCH TROUBLE, so I decided to do this. I'm a bit tired, so this opening note is going to be very short, sorry. 
> 
> I really hope that you enjoy this chapter! It's very tender, I promise. 
> 
> Warnings for language and brief moments of Crowley re-living some trauma. But it gets better, I swear.

Life as Crowley knew it was over. The changes happened in a series of first things, a chain of “the first time”s that he only saw when he looked back on it. He didn’t know that things were changing until they already had, didn’t know that he’d lost some of his loneliness and misery until it was already gone.

Crowley hadn’t known that life could be like this. He hadn’t really known that he could be _happy_. Happy was a thing for other people. Joy was someone else’s, always. Bliss was more a myth than a reality.

Good things didn’t happen to Anthony Crowley until somehow, very suddenly and over a period of months, they did.

*********

The first time that Eli took Crowley’s hand in public, Crowley’s vision went fuzzy and he nearly collapsed forward into the street. They’d held hands a few times before, but they’d never done it where other people could see. Usually, they walked a little too close to one another, and Crowley’s hand would bump against Eli’s wrist and Eli’s shoulder would collide with Crowley’s bicep, and Crowley savored all of these intentionally-unintentional touches. After they’d been dating for a little over two weeks, Eli changed things a bit, and one night after dinner, he’d slipped his arm through the crook in Crowley’s elbow. Crowley had been certain that they looked ridiculous like that, but he wasn’t about to protest the warm press of Eli’s arm on his, the way Eli’s elbow grazed his side every once in a while. It was strange, certainly, and it was _different_, but it was good.

Nothing had prepared him, though, for the way that Eli’s warm fingers would feel against his as they walked along the Shoreditch High Street. Linking arms was one thing, but holding hands was quite another. To a bystander, a pair of men with linked arms could - if they tilted their head ninety degrees and squinted - possibly be perceived as platonic. Maybe one of the men was drunk and needed help walking, something of that sort. But two men holding hands was indisputably romantic, and Crowley found that his brain was struggling to process that.

It wasn’t that he’d never held hands with anyone in public before because he had. He’d done so quite often, in fact, with Anathema, and while he’d known that most outside observers had probably assumed some sort of romantic attachment between them, he hadn’t cared because those observers had been wrong. Holding hands with Eli, however, was an altogether different situation because men aren’t supposed to seek physical affection from their male friends. Platonic hand-holding wasn’t a thing that Crowley had ever even considered with any man he’d ever known because it simply _wasn’t done_. So, holding hands with Eli in the middle of Shoreditch in broad daylight was ridiculously, wonderfully, terrifyingly, _definitely_ romantic, and Crowley didn’t know what to do about it.

They’d been dating (“going steady,” Eli had said one day, which had made Crowley laugh because no one had said that since the 1980s at the very latest) for nearly a month now, so if Crowley had known anything about dating customs, he would have been aware that Eli had really held out on public hand-holding for far longer than most other men would have had the patience for. But Crowley did not know this, and so it was very overwhelming. It felt like Eli had taken a sickeningly-sweet-smelling permanent marker to every inkless inch of his skin and written his name over and over again, filling in the gaps between tattoos with seven small letters. Crowley could almost see all of those E’s and L’s and I’s and F’s crawling over his skin. _Eli Fell, Eli Fell, Eli Fell._ They were everywhere, connecting the dots of the freckles on his cheeks, curling around the piercings above his eyebrows, snaking along the inside curves of his ears, sprawling down the scarce open spaces on his chest and arms.

Eli had claimed Crowley as his own, his thick fingers becoming brands that pressed into Crowley’s skin. And it was so far beyond frightening that Crowley couldn’t describe it, but it was also so impossibly wonderful that it made his weak excuse for a heart turn to goo inside his chest.

He’d never been anyone’s before. He hadn’t known what it would be like to belong to someone. He hadn’t known it would feel so _warm_.

His palm was getting sweaty, sweatier than it should have been given the cool air of early fall, and it was getting harder and harder for Crowley to keep his grip. His bony fingers were slipping between Eli’s, his hand so sweat-slick that it was almost flung free with every swing of his arm. The blood was rushing in Crowley’s ears, muffling the sound of Eli’s melodic voice, stopping him from listening to the man whose fingers were pressed to his like five branding irons. He couldn’t hear anything but his own heartbeat, and he couldn’t feel anything but the way his hand was nearly sliding out of Eli’s grasp with every step, and he was adrift in his own mind.

One word from Eli broke through like a life preserver, so Crowley clung to it and let Eli pull him out of the storm that was preparing to break loose inside his head.

“Dearest.” There had been words around that one, but Crowley had latched onto those two syllables like the drowning man that he was. It was a new endearment to add to the list of ones he’d heard before, a growing list of wonderful things. _My dear. Darling. Handsome. Cariad_ (that one was Welsh for “sweetheart,” and Crowley had been so absolutely in love with the sound of it that he’d lunged across the sofa to kiss the other words off of Eli’s lips). There were so many. Eli threw them around like they weighed nothing, but when Crowley caught them, they weighed as much as the gold they were made of. He loved them, those little words, and _dearest_ was the newest of them.

“Sorry,” Crowley said, shaking his head to clear out the water that had been rising in it. “What’d you say?”

“I asked if you were alright. You were… gone, for a minute there.” Eli’s eyebrows were slanted together, pinching lines across his forehead, and his dark eyes were soft with worry.

“Sorry.” It was only then that Crowley realized that he was standing in an alley. Evidently, Eli had been concerned enough to pull them off of the main street.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Crowley said immediately, and then he felt a gust of cool wind blow across his sweat-soaked palm. His empty, handless, sweat-soaked palm.

Eli was watching him, taking small breaths and making no movements. He did that, sometimes, when Crowley freaked out. He’d make himself very small, very non-threatening, and wait until Crowley was ready for him to move again.

Crowley hadn’t understood why Eli did this, at first, but one night he’d lain awake thinking about it. He’d eventually realized that it was the same way that a man would deal with a frightened animal, and it made a bit of sense. No sudden movements, no loud noises, just watch and wait. Wait for the calm to set in, for things to be alright again.

When Eli spoke, his voice was even and slow. “I know you, Crowley. You don’t just disappear on me unless there’s something wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Crowley insisted, the warmth fading from his hand with every passing second. “I just wasn’t expecting you to…” He trailed off, wiggling his fingers at Eli.

“Was it too much?”

“No,” Crowley said, the word falling from his lips too quickly, too easily. He’d gotten too good at lying. But he didn’t want to lie anymore, couldn’t find it in him to lie with Eli’s worry-pinched face so close to his own, so he corrected himself. “Wait, no, I meant yes.”

Eli flinched, just a little, and took a step back. “Whenever you’re ready, then.”

“I want to be ready,” Crowley said softly.

“But you’re not.” It wasn’t a criticism. It was a statement, kind and gentle, and Crowley’s puddle-of-goo-heart jolted in his chest.

“No, but I want you to do it again.”

Something close to amusement flickered across Eli’s face. “You’re not making any sense.”

“I know.”

“Holding my hand scares you.”

“When we’re in public, yeah." He took a breath, and then, "Do it again.”

“Why?”

Crowley couldn’t take it anymore. His hand was twitching, trying to stretch out and link itself with Eli’s, so he let it. He surged forward, closed the gap between his body and Eli’s, and kissed him. He could feel the warm rush of air from Eli’s startled gasp against his skin, and he smiled into Eli’s lips. And then, while their mouths were linked together for a brief few seconds, Crowley reached out and fumbled for Eli’s fingers, finding them cool from where the air had dried his own sweat on his boyfriend’s skin, and Crowley locked their fingers back together.

Smiling, Eli gave Crowley’s hand a squeeze. “Do you want to find a coffee shop?” He sounded deliciously out of breath, so Crowley grinned at him.

“Always do.”

It wasn’t until they’d gotten halfway down the block that Crowley realized some things about the kiss in the alley. He’d kissed someone in that same alley before, back when he’d first opened the shop. The bloke’s name was lost to his memories, now, but that kiss had been full of too much tongue and urgency, and Crowley hadn’t enjoyed it as much as he’d wanted to. But the soft press of Eli’s lips on his, the way Eli’s breath skated over his skin, the way Eli’s eyes fluttered closed… all of that was good. All of that was better than before. And the irony of a public-hand-holding-induced moment of panic being solved by a semi-public kiss wasn’t lost on Crowley, either, so he smiled to himself as he walked.

His palm was still too sweaty, and his heart was still beating too fast, but he thought that he could get used to this. Given time and practice, yes. He could get very used to this.

*********

The first time that Crowley said “I love you” to anyone since he’d said it to his father on that terrible night when his world had fallen apart (and been promptly put back together by a curly-haired, soft-sided, bright-smiled bookseller), he said it to someone who should have heard it a long time ago.

She was sitting on his sofa drinking a glass of cheap rosé, listening to him rant about his lack of romantic knowledge.

“... and he has all these pet names for me, y’know? It’s-” Crowley flapped his hands around, gesturing at nothing and everything “-good, I think. I think it’s good, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

Anathema laughed at him, breath fogging up her wine glass. “What do you usually do?”

“Turn red, mostly. Sometimes kiss him if we’re in private.”

“Do you ever say any of them back to him?”

Crowley wrinkled his nose. “What?”

“Call him something sweet. D’you ever do that?”

“No,” Crowley said, face growing pink with embarrassment. “I hadn’t thought… I don’t know how I’d… I don’t know what to say.”

“You should give it a go. He won’t mind what you say, I don’t think.”

“Ngh,” said Crowley, and he took a large gulp of his wine. “Dunno what I’d call him.”

“Whatever you want, you fucking idiot.”

Crowley wiggled his eyebrows at her and reached for the bottle to top off his glass. “Is that your pet name for me, An?”

“Fuck off.”

He decided it was, smiled to himself, and continued talking about Eli.

“Anyway, yeah. He just _says_ things sometimes, too - like last night, I picked him up for dinner and he just said ‘You look very handsome.’ Like it was _nothing_.”

“It probably was, for him,” Anathema said helpfully, shoving her feet under Crowley’s legs (she did this when she was cold, so it was neither new nor strangely intimate).

“How is that even possible?”

Anathema considered him, head tilted, as she took another sip of wine. “Do you ever look at him and think that his hair looks good?”

“Uh-huh.” _All the bloody time._

“Do you ever like what he’s wearing?”

Crowley snorted. “He dresses like he’s running late for bingo at the care home social.”

“But you like it, yeah?”

“Mpf.”

“Fine, what about his smile? Eyes? Hands? He’s a handsome bloke, yeah?”

“You know he is,” Crowley said. “You’ve seen him.”

She was smirking at him, which had never really been a good thing, so he braced himself for the onslaught of teasing. It came, right on time, and he stuck his tongue out at her for it.

“That’s my point, you daftie. Tell him the things you like about him.”

“I’m not good with words. He’s great with ‘em, I’m not.”

“Tony.” Anathema’s voice was stern, near scolding. “I do not think that Eli would give a flying fuck what you said as long as you said _something_.”

With a groan, Crowley let his head sink back against the arm of the sofa. “I’m a terrible boyfriend.”

“Yeah, you really are.”

“He’s going to break up with me.”

“Nah,” Anathema said, a soft teasing smile on her lips. “If he was gonna do that because you’re rubbish at romance, he’d’ve done it already.”

“Thanks,” Crowley snapped. “Really bloody helpful.”

“Really, though. Seems like you might be stuck with him.”

Crowley’s stomach gave a little twist. _Stuck with him._ Good, yeah. Good.

They stayed up too late, talking and joking and comparing the things their boyfriends were doing. The bottle stood empty on the table for a long while, screw cap fallen to the floor, but for once, Crowley didn’t make any move to grab a new bottle of something. He stayed where he was, stretched across the couch with Anathema’s feet tucked behind his knees, staring at the ceiling and talking about Eli and _smiling_.

He didn’t need a new bottle of anything this time. He didn’t need to pour bad liquor down his throat, didn’t need to feel the burn in his throat and the warmth pool in his belly. It was already there, somehow, that feeling. Eli’s name fell from his lips so often that he sounded like a scratched and beaten record, but he didn’t care. Telling Anathema about the way Eli’s hand felt in his burned his throat more than a shot of cinnamon whiskey ever had. Thinking about the time Eli had kissed his knuckles (when Crowley had asked why he’d done it, Eli had shrugged and said, “Because I wanted to. Your hands are lovely”) made a different kind of heat settle in his stomach, a new kind of of happy-warm-lovely-nice thing that permeated everything inside of him. Eli was better than alcohol had ever been, and Crowley loved Anathema enough to tell her about him, and that was very good.

She slept on his couch again, and in the morning, Crowley awoke to the sound of her keys jangling as she headed for the door. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and dragged himself to the doorway, eyes still heavy with sleep.

“Hey,” Crowley said around a yawn. “Bye.”

“You didn’t have to get up.” She was grinning at him, though, a piece of buttered toast in her hand.

“You didn’t have to steal food from my kitchen again, either, but here we both are.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever. I’ll do it again next time.”

He sighed. “I fuckin’ know.”

“I have to go,” she said, blowing him a crumb-and-butter-flavored kiss from across the room. “Love you much.”

Looking back on it, Crowley wasn’t sure why he’d said it, but one of the bricks that had recently fallen off of his walls had apparently left an I-love-you-shaped hole around his heart, so he said it.

“I love you, too.”

Anathema froze, hand on the doorknob. When she turned around, her eyebrows were halfway up her forehead in shock. It was the same expression she’d had on her face when Crowley had told her that he’d kissed Eli in a fit of jealous anger and wound up with a boyfriend (Anathema’s side of that conversation had gone like this: “You have a _what_?” / “_You_ are in a relationship?” / “Wait, _Eli_? Oh, thank fucking Someone.”), and Crowley couldn’t stop the tips of his ears turning red when he realized what he’d said.

“I know,” Anathema said finally, dark eyes still wide in surprise.

“You- you know?”

“You never had to say it. I can tell.”

“Oh.” Bit anticlimactic, that.

“But I’m glad that you did. Really glad.”

“Hmm.”

“I love you, idiot. Have a good day.” Another kiss traveled through the air and lodged itself in Crowley’s chest, and then Anathema was gone, leaving a trace of spiced perfume in the air behind her.

It was new, that L-word thing Crowley had just done, but it was uncomfortable in a way that was less sharp-rocks-and-searing-pain (which was what he’d expected) and more too-warm-from-tight-hugs-and-long-bouts-of-laughter.

It was a good sort of uncomfortable, Crowley decided, and he let himself feel it for the rest of the day. One of his clients - John, he came in every half-year or so to get something new and permanent pushed into his skin - said something about Crowley looking different, and Crowley smiled at him (his real smile, actually, not his fake one) and said that he felt different.

And it didn’t scare him, really, the thing he’d done. It should have, maybe, but it didn’t. The last time he’d said it, it had been a goodbye. This time, it was just a thing that was already known, a well-established quantity. So it was better, this time, saying it to the family that mattered.

Because families say “I love you.”

*********

The first time that Crowley took Anathema’s advice and gave Eli a compliment, it didn’t go precisely according to plan.

Crowley had gotten a new earring. It was a silver snake designed to coil around the outer cartilage on his ear, and he’d put it on before bringing ice cream over to Eli’s flat. They were going to have a movie night (Eli didn’t own a television, but he did own a projector, so Crowley had begrudgingly agreed to watch one of the old black-and-white films that Eli had in his storage closet), and when they’d settled onto the couch in the main room of Eli’s flat, Eli had looked up at Crowley and smiled.

“What?” Crowley asked, an amused smirk turning up the corner of his mouth.

“You got a new earring,” Eli said, reaching up to touch it lightly with the tip of his finger. “It’s lovely.”

Crowley knew that it was time to act, time to say something kind in return, but he couldn’t figure out what to say. Eli’s hair was beautiful (it always was), and the smile on his face was brightening the room (it always did), and his softly curving body was the most beautiful thing that Crowley had ever seen (he always thought this). He was perfect and beautiful, and Crowley’s brain was incapable of deciding on just one thing to say.

“I- I like your everything,” Crowley said stupidly, words getting caught on his tongue and teeth and lips. It was ridiculous - _he_ was ridiculous - and he knew that as soon as he’d said it. So, face and ears flushed with humiliation, Crowley stared at his lap and moved to turn on the projector.

Eli’s hand on his stopped him, and he forced himself to meet Eli’s eyes again. To his surprise, a thin film of tears was hovering between Eli’s eyelids. His already bright eyes were shining with them, and Crowley’s breath caught in his throat.

_You’re so beautiful,_ Crowley thought desperately. _Oh, God, how are you so beautiful?_

“I like your everything, too.”

The tears in Eli’s eyes never fell onto his cheeks. They just slipped away silently, but Crowley knew that they had been there, and so he smiled. And when he smiled, Eli’s face broke into a teasing grin, and then Crowley registered how completely stupid they both sounded and burst into laughter.

So he laughed, and Eli’s high-pitched laughter joined in, and together they made a two-person symphony.

When Crowley got home, he pulled the red sketchbook out of its drawer in his desk and drew another portrait of Eli laughing, his fourth iteration of the same thing.

But each one was different; none were truly the same. In one, Eli’s head was thrown back, exposing his soft neck. In another, Eli’s eyes were cast down at his shoes, a blush in his cheeks. In yet another, Eli’s eyes were closed and his mouth was wide open (he’d been howling with laughter, and Crowley’s heart had twisted and his brain had captured a mental photo of that indescribable joy).

And in the one that Crowley drew that night, he drew Eli’s pretty mouth curved into the laugh-soaked smile that he’d seen, and he wrote another single word beneath it.

_Everything._

*********

The first time that Eli called him “Anthony,” it hurt so badly that Crowley stopped breathing. It hit him in the gut, pushing needles into something very broken that was crushed beneath stones shaped like “Mum” and “Dad.”

He made some sort of choked-off groaning sound and felt the air in his lungs disappear. His lungs themselves were crumpled up, wrinkled and crushed in Eli’s hands like sheets of newsprint moments before being thrown into a dying fire. They’d agreed that Eli calling Crowley by his surname was odd for a relationship that was going on two months long, so Crowley had given Eli permission to try different names.

“Tony” had sounded clunky and awful in Eli’s proper-sounding grammar and lilting accent. “AJ” had been much the same, but worse, so that one hadn’t even been said more than once. Eli had even tried calling him “James” for a few days; it was Crowley’s middle name, but even his parents had never really used it, so he didn’t respond to it at all, and so that name had failed as well.

Crowley hadn’t even considered that Eli might use his given name. He should have thought about it, prepared himself for the possibility, but he’d thought that Eli would have known not to use it.

He’d been wrong, apparently, because Eli had just looked him in the eye and said, “Anthony, dear, what kind of tea would you like tonight?”

And with that simple sentence, the pain had set in, deep and real and gut-wrenching, and Crowley had lost his breath. He’d lost himself to the shaking of his body, curled his arms around his middle and _squeezed_, trying to force his lungs to work again.

It didn’t work. The pain stayed, and Crowley bled, and there was nothing that could make it better. There was nothing, nothing at all, until there was.

Eli’s hands, strong and heavy and warm, grabbed Crowley’s shoulders and pulled, _hard_. The scent of Eli’s cologne, clean and fresh, filled Crowley’s nose. The scratchy fabric of Eli’s ugly tartan-patterned jumped rubbed against Crowley’s cheek, and the sound of Eli’s heartbeat echoed in Crowley’s ears.

The hands on Crowley’s shoulders vanished. One rematerialized in his hair, stroking it with impossible tenderness, and the other wrapped around Crowley’s thin torso, bringing him in closer. Somehow, the closeness kickstarted Crowley’s shriveled lungs, and they came to life once more. He drew in a shuddering breath, letting himself be held and trying desperately not to feel the needles piercing that broken part of himself.

“I’m sorry,” Eli whispered into Crowley’s hair. “My dear, my darling, I’m _so_ sorry.”

Crowley didn’t - _couldn’t_ \- respond. He just buried his face in Eli’s jumper, hands coming up to tangle in the rough fabric. Eli kept whispering apologies, kept saying sorry, kept touching Crowley’s hair and back and sides with gentle strokes of warm fingers.

They stayed like that for a long while, Eli holding Crowley and Crowley letting himself be held. By the time Crowley finally lifted his head off of Eli’s chest, it had started raining. Typical London, yes, but also very fitting for the hurricane roaring in Crowley’s soul.

“I’m sorry,” Eli said for the thousandth time. “I don’t know why I said that. It just slipped out, I think. I’m so sorry. It won’t happen again.”

When he had been wrapped in Eli’s arms, the thoughts in Crowley’s brain had eventually slowed enough for him to make some sense of them. He knew that hearing his name was excruciatingly painful; the sharpness in his gut was more than enough evidence of that. But there was also a part of him that had brightened at the sound of those short syllables being said in a way that was kind and gentle instead of harsh and accusing or broken and tinged with goodbye. A tiny piece of Crowley loved that Eli had called him Anthony, loved that he’d wrapped that bruised and battered word with tenderness and care, and so Crowley had managed to calm himself down by focusing on that part of things.

“You don’t have to never say it again,” Crowley said into Eli’s shoulder.

“What?”

“You can call me… that, if you want.”

Eli’s shocked chuckle rumbled through his chest and beat against Crowley’s ears. “No, cariad, I don’t want. I never want to cause you pain.”

“Pain’s already there. You’re not causing it, okay? I think you’re making it better.”

“Crowley-” Eli started, hands stilling in Crowley’s hair, but he didn’t get to finish because Crowley gritted his teeth and corrected him.

“Anthony.”

“My dear, I don’t want you to be in pain because of me.”

“I don’t want you to keep calling me Crowley.” And what a change that was from before. Once upon a time, a year and months and a lifetime ago, Crowley had pulled his hand out from under Eli’s and asked to be called Crowley. Once, he’d slammed the door in Eli’s face as he added bricks to his walls. Once, he’d run away from this.

But not now. Now he had it, and he would be damned if he was ever going to let it go.

“We’ll find something else,” said Eli softly, hands still very still. “Some other name.”

Crowley could tell that he was going to have to be direct this time. No distracting Eli with kisses in order to take his hand. No blundering compliments that ended in smiles and laughter. None of that typical avoidance. Not now.

So, shaking slightly, Crowley shifted around to rest his forehead against Eli’s cheek, and then he said, “Call me Anthony. Please.”

And Eli caved. “Alright.”

The next time that Eli called him Anthony, it still hurt, but it hurt a lot less. It was just different, just _better_, to hear that name from the lips of the first man he’d ever dared to care this much about. The more Eli said it, the less Crowley felt the pain, and eventually, he even smiled at the sound of “Anthony” wrapping itself around Eli’s tongue.

There were still needles dug into that part of Crowley, but Eli had moved the stones that were crushing it. And he’d done something to the needles, too: he’d tied them to thread. Eli had unknowingly sewn back together something that Crowley had assumed to be a lost cause.

*********

The first time that Anthony Crowley realized that he was in love with Eli Fell, absolutely nothing changed.

It happened three months and four days after their first kiss and first date, and it was an entirely ordinary thing that did it. They were sitting in the same coffee shop that they used to frequent when they were just friends, and Eli kept sneaking smile-touched glances across the table at Crowley.

Crowley was sketching, and Eli was writing a poem, and they weren’t talking. They were just together, just drinking very different beverages and doing their own things, and it was perfectly ordinary.

He wasn’t sure what exactly it was that made him realize. It might have been the way that Eli was smiling at the page he was writing on. It might have been the fact that they were in a familiar place but in a very different situation. It might have been the way the lighting of the shop caught in Eli’s hair like ribbons of silver. Or maybe it wasn’t any of that. Maybe it was just time for Crowley to know.

Regardless of why, Crowley looked up at Eli and found that he could only form one thought: _I’m in love with you._ And it should have been different, but it wasn’t. It should have been new, but it wasn’t. This was, of course, because he’d quite possibly been in love with Eli since the day he’d met him in St. James’s Park.

Given all previous evidence, Crowley should have been terrified. He should have flown into a panic, made up some excuse to leave and go drink himself into a stupor. He should have at the very least stepped outside to call Anathema in order to sort out his feelings. These are things that should have happened, but none of them did.

Despite the odds, Crowley had fallen deeply and inexorably in love, and he found that he was okay with that.

The reason for this being-okay-ness was sitting across the table, mumbling rhymes under his breath and tucking a pencil behind his ear, completely unaware of what was happening inside of Crowley’s head.

Eli looked up, then, and caught Crowley staring.

“Do I have something on my face, dear?”

Crowley grinned at him. “No. I just… I like you.”

If there was an award for Understatement of the Year, Crowley would have just won it without any contest at all.

Dark eyes sparkling, Eli leaned across the table and kissed Crowley on the tip of his nose. “And I like you, Anthony.”

It was a Saturday in November, and it was raining and grey and for most of the world, it was completely unremarkable. But in a small coffee shop in Soho, London, a formerly romance-averse tattoo artist sat across from a fair-haired used bookseller and finally let himself be in love, and that was quite remarkable indeed.


	13. Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something makes Crowley do and say things that he's been needing to do and say for a good long while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, friends! 
> 
> Sorry it's taken me so long to get this chapter done - I was really sick for a few days and had a bunch of other life-stuff stack up, but I sat down this afternoon and finally got this done. It starts off pretty rough, but I promise it gets better. 
> 
> This chapter is a lot of dialogue again, sorry. I'm not entirely sure that I'm happy with the pacing of things, so please let me know if you think it's alright! 
> 
> Those of you who've been following me on Tumblr for a couple weeks will recognize the ending to this chapter, by the way ;) Anyway, enjoy! 
> 
> Warnings for language, a pretty traumatic dream sequence, and discussions of religion.

Everything was burning. Pages caught in the flames and dissolved into ash, smoldering in piles on the ground. More paper floated through the air, charred on the edges and carried by plumes of smoke and rising hot air. Everything was burning, and it was _hot_, too hot, and Crowley was shouting himself hoarse.

“Eli! Eli, where are you, you idiot?” He was running, batting burning pages and floating embers out of the air, gagging on smoke and not caring about himself at all. “I can’t find you!”

The fire burned brighter, hotter, _worse_ at the sound of his words, but he kept on. He stumbled through the maze of bookshelves that lay empty now like so many skeletons, the cinder-stacks of what were once Eli’s books falling in crumbling grey-and-orange heaps over the edges of the shelves. Crowley could feel the heat singeing his skin, could smell the smoke and hear the crackling of the flames as they ate everything without preference. None of this mattered, though. Nothing mattered but finding Eli, finding him and getting him out of here.

And then Crowley rounded the final shelf, his lungs thick with the black smoke that had replaced the air in the shop, and his heart stopped.

A flash of tartan, a cream coat turned black in places, a mop of once-white curls. On the floor, not moving, not crying out for help.

Still.

Silent.

Gone.

A new sound broke out over the hissing of smoke and the roaring of the flames. It was high-pitched and awful, shrill and ear-splitting and terrible, and it took Crowley a moment to realize that it was him. His own screams of agony were filling his ears, wordless and unintelligible and irreparably _broken_. As soon as he understood the sound, he stopped, gagging on the wails that caught in his throat.

Everything was still burning, but none of it mattered anymore. Slowly, too slowly, Crowley crossed the burning floor and sank to his knees, hands hovering mere inches above the smoking fabric of Eli’s coat.

When he spoke again, his voice was raw from smoke and screaming, and he could barely hear himself. “Eli.”

Nothing.

“Eli, _please_.”

Behind him, the flames grew into demonic tongues that laughed at his misfortune, so Crowley bent his body in half and curled it around Eli’s. He was staying here, now. He wouldn’t leave.

“I love you,” Crowley said, voice breaking on the truth of it. Why hadn’t he said it before? Why hadn’t he done this when he’d had the chance, when Eli could hear him?

Because he was desperate and wounded and scared, Crowley grabbed the cinder-caked body of the man he loved and held him close. Then, because he hadn’t done it when he should have, he sobbed out an unending stream of words until his lungs refused to breathe and his mouth refused to form the words.

When he closed his eyes, Crowley could still feel the shape of them on his scorched tongue. They felt like _I love you_, like _I’m in love with you_, like _Please don’t leave me_, like _Come back to me_.

The words were still there when he woke up, clutching at his throat and gasping and thrashing around in his sweat-soaked sheets. His green eyes were wide, and he choked on the cleanness of the air when he drew in breath after rasping breath. Inside his chest, Crowley’s heart was denting his ribs.

“It was a dream,” Crowley said, his voice shaking and fragile. “Eli’s alright. He’s fine.”

And then the sound of sirens trickled in, carried up from the street, and Crowley was on his feet in a moment.

He didn’t remember running out of his flat, but here he was, sprinting down an empty London sidestreet at four in the morning in the middle of December. It must have been cold out, but he didn’t feel it. He just let his long legs carry him through Soho, following the wailing of the sirens and praying to a God he didn’t believe in that he could make it in time.

As he ran, there was one thought racing through his mind:_ I will not lose him._

The Quill & Ink stood on the corner where it always had, dark and empty and completely flameless. The sirens from the fire trucks had disappeared, but they still rang in Crowley’s ears, so he kept running right up until he could rest his hand on the cool wood of the shop’s front door. With his chest heaving and his legs threatening to give out, Crowley pressed his palms and forehead to the door, and then finally, _finally_, he rested. His thin body slid down, hands leaving sweaty tracks in their wake as his knees buckled and he crashed to the ground. Crowley sat there, slumped against the doorframe of his boyfriend’s shop at just after four in the morning, and he cried.

And then the door opened, and Crowley blinked the tears out of his eyes, clearing his vision enough to see Eli standing in the doorway.

“Anthony?”

Crowley hadn’t thought that anyone could pack that much worry and concern into three syllables, but somehow, Eli had done it. He forced himself to his feet again and wiped the tears from his cheeks, wracking his brain for some explanation as to why he was outside of Eli’s shop at this hour.

He couldn’t come up with any reason, so he just forced his mouth into a weak sort of smile and said, “Sorry. I was just… sorry. Please go back to sleep.”

Eli rolled his eyes and grabbed Crowley by the hand, pulling him into the shop. “You stupid, _stupid_ man. I wasn’t sleeping - when do I ever?” There was a teasing note in Eli’s lilting voice, but the concern was still there, woven in like thread in a tapestry.

Standing in the foyer of Eli’s shop, Crowley realized a few things. First, he was _cold_. Second, he was only wearing his boxers and a housecoat, and he was barefoot. Third, Eli was wearing some sort of two-piece button-down pajama set, and there was also - _oh, why?_ \- one of those floppy night caps perched on top of his curls.

It was this last bit that broke Crowley’s composure entirely, and he collapsed into wheezing, hysterical laugher. Eli’s arms wrapped around his middle, and Crowley found that he’d been _lifted into the air_ and was being carried through the shop toward the stairs at the back. He couldn’t stop himself from laughing, though, so he just kept snorting and giggling into Eli’s shoulder.

By the time they got into the flat, Eli’s breath was leaving his body in puffs, and when Crowley managed to stop laughing long enough to look up at him, his soft cheeks were flushed from exertion. Crowley tried to squirm away, to detach himself from Eli’s arms, but Eli wouldn’t let him.

With a heavy sigh (and a slight creaking complaint from the furniture), Eli plopped down on his sofa, still cradling Crowley’s long body like a mother would a child.

“Anthony,” Eli began softly, one of his hands burying itself in Crowley’s dark and sweat-dampened hair. “Will you please tell me what is going on?”

Dread settled like a stone in the pit of Crowley’s stomach. How could he begin to explain this? He’d had a nightmare, a nightmare in which Eli was _dead_, and it had sent him into a panic so intense that when he’d heard the sirens of a fire truck, he’d run across Soho just to make sure that Eli was alright.

“I’m crazy,” Crowley mumbled into Eli’s chest, sliding downwards a bit so that his head rested on Eli’s thigh. He’d wanted to move farther than that, wanted to sit up and regain some dignity, but Eli’s hands were holding him in place. “That’s all. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“Not good enough.” The hand in Crowley’s hair was still moving in soft stroking motions, but the words were flat. “Please, dearest, tell me the truth.”

Silence hung low and heavy over them until, “You were gone.”

“What?”

“I had a dream.” Crowley squeezed his eyes shut, not wanting to see the look of disgust on Eli’s face when he realized that Crowley’s sanity was far from intact. “Nightmare, really. I was in the bookshop, and everything was on fire, and you were-” He stopped, unable to force himself to form the word. So, he stuttered around a whole lot of nothing for a moment before falling silent.

“I was dead, wasn’t I?” Eli’s voice was softer than Crowley had ever heard it, which was quite a feat for someone whose voice is already the softest thing imaginable.

Crowley nodded. “Yeah.”

“So you came to check? Came to make sure I was alright?” It was like he already knew.

“Heard the sirens first, but yeah. I just… I’m sorry.”

“Do stop apologizing, my dear.”

“Sorry,” Crowley said reflexively, and above him, Eli’s body shook with a laugh.

A different kind of quiet settled over the room, then, and Crowley waited. The tension in his body wouldn’t fade, so he just stayed stiff and waited for Eli to say something about breaking up or calling things off.

Eli didn’t say anything of the sort. What he said was, “ I am so sorry that I left you.”

“What?” Crowley jerked backwards off of Eli’s lap, scrambling for some purchase on the edge of the couch before falling onto the floor. In another circumstance, it might have been funny, but both of them knew that this time, it wasn’t.

“I’m sorry that I left you,” Eli repeated. “In your dream. I’m sorry.”

If he’d been in possession of any of his usual wit, Crowley probably would have pointed out the irony in Eli telling him to stop apologizing and following it up immediately with an apology of his own. But he wasn’t, and so he just sat on the floor and stared.

“I can assure you that I didn’t mean to leave you,” Eli continued, reaching a hand down toward Crowley as an offer of help.

The words were out of Crowley’s mouth before he could catch them and cram them back in. “But you might, someday. You might leave, and you might mean to.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

“You can’t know that. You haven’t seen all of me, yet - I’m not good, okay? I try to be, I try to be better for you, but I’m not good. I’m bad, yeah? And- and I’m broken, and when you see that, you’ll leave.”

“I really don’t think that I will.”

“You should.” Crowley wasn’t sure at which point he’d swallowed a vial of truth serum, but it was certainly taking effect. “You should leave. You should go - I don’t want you to, please don’t - but you should.”

Slowly, Eli lowered himself off of the sofa and onto the ground. He leaned back against the cushions, facing Crowley, and stretched his hand out again. This time, because he didn’t see any other option, Crowley took it.

“Why should I? I don’t want to.” Eli’s thumb moved in slow circles across the back of Crowley’s hand.

“Because I’ll ruin you.” And there it was, that awful truth that Crowley had held inside of him for so long. He was in love with Eli, and Eli was far beyond wonderful, but some twisted part of him always reminded him of the impermanence of things. He didn’t want to lose Eli - he was _terrified_ of losing Eli, really, and had been since back when Seaghan had been around - but part of him was convinced that he would.

“Oh, my darling,” Eli said softly, his dark eyes meeting Crowley’s light ones. “You could never.”

“I’m not good.”

“You _are_.”

“I’m a mess.”

A laugh. “Yes, a bit of one, but aren’t we all?”

“I break everything I touch.”

Eli lifted Crowley’s shaking hand and pressed a kiss to his knuckles. “No, my dear, you don’t. Your hands make beautiful things, and I’ve never seen them so much as scratch anything.”

Crowley had loved, and he had lost, and tonight, he’d done both. He’d lost Eli in that dream, lost him to a fire that had never happened, and now he sat here and loved him with every single part of himself.

Well, he thought that he loved Eli with everything, and then Eli spoke again and made him realize just how much more of himself he had to give.

“You are the best thing in my life, don’t you know that?”

The sound that Crowley made was the same mixture of sob and whimper that he’d made the night that Eli had dragged him into the bathroom and called him beautiful. That night was long ago, and so much had changed since then, but the broken pieces of Crowley still remained. There were fewer of them, now, because he’d held Eli’s hand in Shoreditch and told his best friend that he loved her. There was gold shining from some of the cracks between his no-longer-broken pieces because he’d gotten his name back and because he’d fallen in love, and he was less fractured than he had been because he had a pile of Good Things in his life.

But, Crowley had discovered, having less broken pieces is not the same as being whole.

“You’re the best fuckin’ thing on this planet.” It was choked-off and horribly romantic, but Crowley couldn’t _not_ say it. What he wanted to say (and what, given the dream he’d had, he probably should have said) was “I love you,” but it felt wrong to do it here. It felt sacrilegious, somehow, to say something so beautiful while sitting on the floor surrounded by the broken pieces of your own soul.

He couldn’t say exactly what made him realize it, but it might have been the way that Eli’s face showed just a fragment of doubt before breaking into the joyful smile that Crowley had come to love. It was the thousandth variation on the smiles that Eli gave him a hundred times every day, but this time, Crowley saw the moment of hesitation.

Eli, Crowley came to understand in the quarter of a second that doubt tinged the most beautiful smile in the world, had broken pieces too.

Sitting on Eli’s carpet at what must have now been near five in the morning, Crowley decided that he would tell Eli everything good that he’d ever thought about him. Where he got the courage from was anyone’s guess, and the fact that he found the words was a literal miracle, but Crowley said things because he had to. He hadn’t said them before, not like this, but he needed to. He’d lost Eli once tonight, and he wouldn’t ever risk losing him again without telling him. So, he took a shuddering breath, braced himself, and started talking.

“You’re- you’re beautiful,” Crowley said, stumbling a bit over the first syllables. “I’ve always thought so, ever since that day in the park.”

“No,” Eli said in disbelief, his smile widening. “Since then?”

“Uh-huh. And your voice is beautiful, too - I could listen to you read me your grocery list, if you wanted - and I hate your clothes _so much_, but I also kind of like them. And your hands are my favorite shape of anything, ever. And you give the best hugs, has anyone ever told you that?”

Eli was staring at him, eyes wide in shock. Crowley _never_ talked this much about things that mattered, but here he was now, talking like Eli on a rant about a new book of poetry, and it had clearly taken Eli by surprise.

“I like your scars, too,” Crowley continued, pushing on despite the tightness that was rising in his chest. “The one on your arm, the one that looks like a halo? It’s pretty, and I think you’d look like an angel even without it, but it makes the picture clearer. And- and I never want to stop kissing you. And I want to draw a hundred thousand pictures of you because I like beautiful things, and you’re the most beautiful goddamn bloody thing in this whole fucking universe.”

The shock had faded somewhat, and Eli’s thousand-watt grin was back on his lips. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Crowley was out of breath, but he didn’t mind at all because he’d finally _said things_, and Eli was smiling at him like he’d never find any reason good enough to stop. It had taken a terrifying nightmare and a panicked, shoeless sprint through London and more than a few reassuring words on Eli’s part, but Crowley had opened his stupid mouth and said the things he’d been wanting to say for months, so that was good.

“I… thank you, Anthony.” And then Eli wrapped one of those beautiful hands around the back of Crowley’s neck and pulled him in, kissing him until they both ran out of oxygen.

By the time the sun came up, they had made it back onto the sofa and had been dozing there for a few hours. Crowley’s dark head had somehow landed in Eli’s lap again, and Eli was running his fingers through Crowley’s hair in smooth, straight lines.

“Eli,” Crowley said, voice scratchy with what might have been sleep and might have been the lack of it, “I didn’t ask how you knew I was outside.”

“I was up writing something, and I heard the sirens pass. I went to the window to see what was happening - I don’t even know why I did that, really, I’d usually just ignore them - and just as I was about to go sit back down, I saw you run into the middle of the street.”

“Lucky,” Crowley laughed.

“Not luck so much as divine providence, my dear.”

Crowley quirked an eyebrow. “I don’t believe in God.”

“I know, but I do.”

Maybe Crowley shouldn’t have been surprised by this, but he was. He’d just assumed that Eli, like himself and most of his other friends, was an atheist (or at the very least an agnostic).

“How?” It was a very oversimplified question, but it conveyed the sentiment properly.

Eli’s laugh reverberated through his chest. “Many reasons, my cariad, but I’m sure you’ve heard most of them before.”

“Do you pray?”

“Every day.”

Crowley’s eyebrow moved so far up his forehead that it nearly disappeared into his hairline. “What about?”

“Lots of things,” Eli said simply. “Things I’m thankful for, things I want, things I have questions about.”

“Ngh,” said Crowley, but it wasn’t dismissive. It was permission to keep talking.

“I pray for you, you know. Every day.”

“Why?”

“Because I… I care about you, and I pray for people I care about.”

“Why?”

“Because I want you to be safe.” Eli was looking down at Crowley with unparalleled tenderness, and Crowley found that his cheeks and ears were going warm under the strength of that gaze. “You came here tonight because you don’t want to lose me, right?”

“Mmm.”

“Haven’t you considered that I don’t want to lose you, either?”

Crowley had, in fact, not considered that, so he responded by blinking blankly at Eli and turning an even darker shade of red.

Eli laughed again. “Of course you haven’t. You’re ridiculous, truly.”

“Am not,” Crowley protested, but he couldn’t stop himself from smiling a little anyway. “So, you ask for things that you want?”

“Yes, things that people on Earth can’t give me.”

Crowley thought about this and couldn’t come up with anything that he wanted that people on Earth couldn’t give him, but he let it go. Eli had reasons for everything.

“Do you want to know what I want? Not from God, from… life.”

Eli smiled at him. “Of course.”

“I want to be better, someday. Less afraid, y’know? And I want to try to be nice to An’s boyfriend - I don’t think he’s good enough for her, but she likes him, so I want to be nice. I want to move out of the little flat above my shop and, I dunno, get a house or something. But what I really want is to keep being happy.”

“You’re happy?” Eli sounded a bit like he didn’t believe Crowley, but after the events of the evening (morning?), Crowley couldn’t really blame him.

“More than I’ve been before, yeah.” _Because of you._

“Can I ask you something?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“What do you want from us? From me?”

_Everything,_ Crowley thought but didn’t say. _I want you to love me back, can you do that?_

“I want you to keep being you.” That was enough. For now, it would be enough.

Eli’s hand was still brushing through pieces of Crowley’s hair, and some of that hair was in Crowley’s eyes, but he didn’t miss the pretty pink flush that flooded into Eli’s cheeks. After a minute or two (and, Crowley noted with satisfaction, a few failed attempts at starting a sentence), Eli found the words to ask a question.

“Do you want to know what I’d like to do with you, my dear?”

“Mph,” Crowley mumbled, “Yeah.”

“I want to sit with you while you draw your new ideas, and I want you to tell me how you came up with them. I want you to teach me to cook sometime, and I want to make you wear a frilly apron because I can. I want to share a bottle of my best red with you, and then I want to taste it on your lips.” Crowley shifted a bit at that, trying to hide his rapidly-reddening face in Eli’s waistcoat. “I want to kiss you in the morning, and I want to see you before you’ve had your coffee. I want to go to dinner with you and introduce you as my partner, as my boyfriend, as the man I am so blessed to be with. I want to dance with you - I don’t care where, I just want to do it. And I want to be here when you need me, and I want you to want to talk to me. I want _you_, really. I want to look at you and see your marvelous mind and your lovely smile and all of your insecurities, and I want you to know that I’ll want you because of everything that you are.”

“Eli,” Crowley whispered. His throat was dangerously rough, and he was kicking himself for not being able to keep composure when Eli said things like that. It had been months of this, but he still felt like he’d been clubbed in the stomach, and it was more than a little bit embarrassing. “I can’t breathe.”

“I can,” Eli said, and he pulled Crowley up just enough so that their noses were almost touching. “Let me help you.”

And then Eli kissed him, and nothing else really mattered.

Maybe Crowley still couldn’t hear too many of those things without worrying that he would lose them before he’d even had them. Maybe he still couldn’t process the idea that Eli had thought about doing those things with him. Maybe Crowley wasn’t still ready for all of this, even after all this time, and maybe he still got too overwhelmed to breathe properly.

And maybe all of that was okay when Eli was right there, pushing oxygen from his lungs into Crowley’s, sealing their mouths together with thoughts of things Crowley had never dreamed could be possible.


	14. Fourteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's Christmas, and Crowley goes "home" with Eli. He does a lot of thinking, and he arrives at one very important decision.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this chapter was a headache and a half to write. I think I've gotten it to a place where it does what it needs to do, but please let me know what you think! 
> 
> Yes, this is the penultimate chapter of this story. Yes, I am also sad about it. Yes, there will definitely be more stories from me in the future. 
> 
> Thank you all for taking the time and energy to follow this story. It's fairly divergent from my usual shtick of "happy mostly with some sad" because, as you all have probably realized, this one is more "sad and awful mostly with some happy," which I think is why it's been both harder for me to write and harder for people to be interested in reading.
> 
> But this chapter is fluffy as fuck, so get ready. 
> 
> Warnings for language (I mean, when is there ever not?) and insane amounts of introspection.

Eli snorted into his eggnog, speckling Crowley’s dark shirt with a mist of pale yellow droplets. A pink paper crown sat on top of his white curls, crooked where his head rested on Crowley’s shoulder.

Crowley grinned down at him, wiping off his shirt with the back of his hand, not so much making the mess go away as just making everything sticky. Eli had sat up and was fussing over him, his cup cast aside and warm hands pulling at Crowley’s clothes to check for stains. The crown on his head slipped down and got caught up on his eyebrow and ear, and he looked so absurd that Crowley couldn’t stop himself from leaning in and kissing him. His lips caught the edges of Eli’s worried words, and Eli’s shocked gasp against his mouth made Crowley’s heart jump sideways in his chest.

It wasn’t the first time that Crowley had surprised Eli by shutting him up with a kiss, and Eli’s gasp was always the same. Crowley was a bit in love with it, so he vowed silently to keep surprising him with kisses forever. They broke apart after a short few seconds, and something in Crowley’s chest went gooey and warm at the way Eli chased after his lips, catching them once more in a chaste peck.

Crowley’s mouth tasted like sweet cream and nutmeg. He didn’t even _like_ eggnog, but right now, it was delicious.

“You two are disgusting,” Anathema said (which Crowley thought was a bit hypocritical given that she was sitting in her boyfriend’s lap). “You shouldn’t be allowed to be that cute.”

“Tough shit,” Crowley said, dissolving into laughter when Eli’s hand hit the back of his head in a light slap.

There was a call of “Language, boys!” from the kitchen, and that sent Anathema off into a fit of giggles. Crowley had always thought that the only thing Anathema enjoyed more than telling him off was watching him get told off by someone else, and her current state was suggesting that he was probably right about that.

“Sorry, Mum,” Eli called back, giving Crowley another tap on the back of the head before settling one side of his body against Crowley’s chest. He picked up his eggnog again and took a sip, leaning back and craning his neck to look up at Crowley.

Eli’s eyes were the most expressive part of his very expressive body. His emotions were never hard to read; his posture changed with his mood, he blushed very obviously, and his smile was indisputably joyful. All of these things were part of him, but Crowley loved his eyes most. There were a thousand million ways that they could look, all variations on a theme, and Crowley never got tired of cataloguing them. He committed each one to memory, a careful study of his favorite piece of the man he loved. Sketches of Eli’s eyes had begun to sprawl across the pages of his red and purple sketchbooks, but he knew that he’d never be able to capture all of the little shifts in light and color and texture of Eli’s eyes. So, he took a mental picture of the way that Eli was looking at him now: it was soft, of course, but the mirth in his gaze caused specks of light to glint off of the swirling darkness like so many stars.

Not for the first time, Crowley felt his chest crumple under the weight of Eli’s beauty.

“What?”

The stars in Eli’s eyes disappeared, and his brow was halfway on its way to wrinkled by the time Crowley got himself together and said, “You’re beautiful, angel.”

The lights in Eli’s eyes this time were more like suns than stars, and he tucked his curly head into the space between Crowley’s chest and his chin, the warm blush on his face soaking through Crowley’s shirt and lodging itself inside of Crowley’s heart.

On that cold night a few weeks back, Crowley had decided that “angel” was the only acceptable pet name for Eli, and he’d started to use it after that. It usually had the effect that it was having now; Eli’s soft cheeks would flare red, and he’d stumble his way around some expression of gratitude (usually in English, but once he’d forgotten himself and said it in Welsh).

From the chair across the room, Anathema groaned. “Honestly, you two. You’re killing me.” In response to this, Newt leaned in, kissed her on the cheek, and whispered something in her ear. This, Crowley noted with smug satisfaction, sent Anathema’s cheeks into a blush so vibrant that Crowley could see it from ten feet away.

Newt and Crowley weren’t anything close to the best of friends. They liked each other well enough, but Crowley was fiercely protective of Anathema and had made this clear on his first meeting with Newt by saying something that may or may not have contained the phrase “fuck you up with a cricket bat.” Consequently, Newt had remained slightly afraid of Crowley (Crowley thought that this was a perfectly healthy amount of fear, for what it’s worth), and although he’d never say anything of the sort to his girlfriend, he sometimes wished that her best friend was a bit less scary of a person.

Now, though, Crowley flashed a thumbs-up at Newt, and Newt smiled back. Making Anathema uncomfortable enough to blush was a record-setting sort of thing, and Crowley was happy to keep Newt around as long as he kept making it happen.

“Come on, you lot,” said a gruff voice from the kitchen doorway. “Food’s up.”

Despite his efforts to get rid of it, there was a little piece of Crowley that still mourned for the loss of his family, and this part twinged when he walked into the kitchen and saw the table set for six. He’d always gone home to see his parents for Christmas. This was the first time that he hadn’t done that, and a splinter of pain lodged itself in his heart. It wasn’t enough to make him bleed, but it burned.

And then Eli took his hand and led him to the table, and Crowley remembered that families can be different than the thing he lost. Parents don’t have to be blood relations, and Eli’s parents were Crowley’s proof of that. Parents can be an older, childless pair of university professors who “adopted” a young gay English major who didn’t have anywhere to go for his first Christmas at uni. They call to check on you throughout the year and send you rare books for your birthday, and they tell you to bring your boyfriend (and his best friend, and her boyfriend, if they want to come) around for Christmas dinner this year. They open the door with hugs and Christmas crackers and glasses of eggnog, and they call you their son because you’ve become family to them, too.

Siblings, Crowley realized as he cast a glance at Anathema, can be curly-haired PhD students who bust into your flat unannounced and eat all of your food without asking and teach you how to paint your fingernails and give you the best advice in the world.

_This,_ Crowley thought as Eli’s mom said grace over the meal,_ is more family than I’ve ever had, and I get to keep building it up for the rest of my life._

Eli’s hand squeezed his, and Crowley turned to look at him.

“Happy Christmas, darling.”

Crowley smiled at him, slow and sublimely authentic, watching Eli’s dark eyes dance with pure happiness. “Yeah, happy Christmas.”

Christmas dinner passed in much the same way as it always had. Questions about life were floated across the table, there were periods of silence when everyone got so wrapped up in eating that they forgot to talk altogether, and there were a few instances of dropped forks and almost-spilled drinks. It was the same in all of the practical ways, but Crowley realized that it _felt_ different, _was _different. When Eli’s dad asked him how he’d gotten into tattoos, it didn’t carry the same disapproving air as it had when his mum had asked how work was going (his parents had helped him open the shop, yes, but they’d never been thrilled by his life choices). When Eli’s mum asked about whether he liked living in the city, Crowley found himself being honest and saying that he liked it well enough but had thought about possibly moving out to the country someday. When Anathema cracked a joke, he let himself laugh without fear that the other people in the room would be repulsed by the sound of it. He passed the potatoes when Newt asked for them without worrying about cracking the china (it was chipped and dented all over, which Eli’s mum defended by calling it “well-loved”).

In his entire life, Crowley hadn’t felt anything close to as safe as he did right now, laughing his way through the story of the time he’d made Eli laugh so hard that he snorted a sip of his favorite red wine up his nose. He was used to sitting in a tense near-silence broken only by questions about his personal life that felt like they should have been asked in a sound-proofed room with a two-way mirror on the wall and a tape recorder on the table. He was not used to being smiled at by a parent-figure for no reason, wasn’t used to being able to laugh out loud, wasn’t used to not walking on eggshells.

Crowley finished his story, gasping for breath along with everyone else at the table, and looked over at Eli for what must have been the fortieth time in the space of five minutes. Eli was laughing, but he was also beetroot-red with embarrassment, and he reached up to fix his crooked crown with freshly-manicured fingers, and he was somehow more beautiful than he’d ever been before.

That was a common thought for Crowley, really. Sometimes he would be focused on something else for a while and would forget just how beautiful his angel really was, and then Eli would laugh or smile or take his hand or fix the fucking idiotic Christmas-cracker-crown on his own head, and Crowley would be hit by the knowledge that he was more beautiful than he had been the last time Crowley looked at him.

Looking at Eli was like looking at a Monet. The longer Crowley spent looking, the more things he could see that were interesting and new and wonderful. But Eli wasn’t a painting, and so Crowley could do more than be captivated and fascinated by the colors of his eyes or the light in his hair or the horrible tartan pattern of his bowtie. He could be in love with those things because he was in love with the man they made.

Eli stopped laughing after a minute, and his eyes came to rest on Crowley’s. Crowley didn’t really like getting caught staring, but since he stared at Eli with a frankly absurd regularity, it happened fairly often. Sometimes Eli asked about it, and Crowley found himself praying to a God he didn’t believe in that this wouldn’t be one of those times. Three little words had climbed up his throat and come to rest on his tongue, dangerously close to falling over his lips, and Crowley didn’t want to say them here. He was afraid that Eli would ask him a question and that he wouldn’t be able to say anything but “I love you, I love you, I love you” in response.

Luckily, Eli didn’t ask him about it then. He just smiled his softest smile and covered Crowley’s hand with his own, diving back into the conversation with an equally embarrassing story about Crowley spilling an entire cup of hot cider down the front of his body because he hadn’t put the lid on properly.

_I love you,_ Crowley thought again even as his face grew hot from humiliation. _You stupid beautiful idiot, I’m in love with you._

Later, when Eli kissed him under the mistletoe that had been hung from the doorway to the guest bedroom where they were spending the night, Crowley said those words with his lips and tongue. He wrote them into Eli’s skin when he wrapped a hand around the back of Eli’s neck to pull him in closer, and he stitched them into the fabric of Eli’s jumper when his hands fell to rest on Eli’s waist after their kiss.

“Hi,” Eli said as his eyes fluttered open. He sounded deliciously out of breath, and Crowley had to restrain himself from ducking back down to suck the remaining air out of his lungs.

“Hi.”

“You’re a very good kisser, do you know that?”

Crowley smirked. “Am I?”

“Very good.”

“You said that already,” Crowley teased, heart pounding at the unfocused look in Eli’s eyes. He liked when he could do that, liked kissing Eli so well that Eli lost his ordinarily daunting control over the vocabulary of the English language.

“Will you shut up and kiss me again, you-” He was cut off by Crowley doing exactly as he was asked to, pressing his smile against the insult that had been forming on Eli’s lips. They stayed there for a while, just standing together under a funny-looking leaf with no real importance at all, breathing in each other’s breaths and smiling through all of it. Crowley’s hands stayed on Eli’s waist, fingers pressing gently into the softness beneath the clothes and leaving small invisible marks on the skin there.

_I love you,_ Crowley thought again, dizzy with the headiness of it as he pulled his mouth away. He nuzzled his nose into the pink-tinged skin of Eli’s cheek, forcing himself to catch a breath that kept darting just out of reach. _I love you._

Eli’s hands were still wrapped around Crowley’s neck, the tips of his long fingers brushing at the short hair at the nape, playing with a few strands that had gotten a bit too long because Crowley was far past due for a haircut. It was impossibly tender, and the feeling of it made the hairs on Crowley’s ink-darkened forearms stand on end.

Crowley’s ear was next to Eli’s lips, and so he heard it when Eli whispered, “I like that you hold me like this.”

“Like what?” Crowley pressed a kiss to Eli’s cheek, reveling in the sudden warmth that bloomed under his lips.

“With your hands… with your hands there.”

Crowley pressed his fingers into Eli’s hips a little bit more. “Here?”

“Yes,” Eli laughed into his ear. “There.”

“I like my hands here, too.” Mentally, Crowley made a note to touch Eli’s waist as often as possible. He liked that his hands had a place to rest, liked that Eli’s body seemed to have been made to be held by him. He’d never touched the skin there because Eli had never been completely shirtless around him, but he knew it would be as soft as the rest of Eli. It would probably have little stripes, too, little lines of pale pink against the white, tracks that Crowley could trace with his fingers and cover with kisses.

It occurred to Crowley at that moment that he wanted to spend the rest of his life learning about what Eli liked. He wanted to learn where Eli was ticklish (he knew that there was a spot on Eli’s ribs, but he’d found that one by accident when he’d gone in for a hug one night), wanted to find out how tightly Eli liked to be held, wanted to know which places he could kiss that would cause Eli to shiver. And he also wanted to know what Eli _didn’t_ like about himself so that he could touch those things and tell Eli that he was beautiful because of them.

“Come on, dearest,” Eli said, breaking Crowley out of his thoughts. “I think we should get ready for bed.”

Oh, right.

That.

The last time that Crowley had shared a bed, he’d been somewhere between the ages of five and seven, and he’d climbed into his parents’ bed because he’d had a nightmare. When he spent the night at friends’ houses, he’d always taken the sofa or the floor, and he’d never had an occasion to bring anyone home or go home with anyone since being an adult. He didn’t go in for sex, and he hadn’t had any romantic partners, so there hadn’t been a reason for him to have to share a bed. But now, Eli was looking up at him with unchecked affection - _love_, Crowley’s brain suggested, but that didn’t really bear thinking about - and Crowley realized that he had no idea _how_ to share a bed.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sleep next to Eli because he did. He wanted to have the experience of waking up next to someone (preferably wrapped around someone, actually, because Eli was soft and warm and Crowley really wanted to drape his long limbs across Eli’s body and bury his head in Eli’s cushioned chest), but he didn’t know how to go about asking for it.

In the ensuite, Crowley washed up and brushed his teeth, setting the green paper crown that he’d almost forgotten was on his head down next to Eli’s pink one on the counter. He’d taken off his trousers and socks and had unbuttoned his overshirt when he realized that he wasn’t sure how much of his clothing to take off. He didn’t own pajamas - he’d never needed them because he lived alone and slept in his pants - and so he hadn’t brought any. He hadn’t even thought about the fact that he might need them.

Crowley dithered over this decision for a moment, listening to Eli’s heavy steps pacing around the bedroom outside the closed bathroom door. He decided that he’d leave his vest top and pants on - it was more modest than his usual shirtlessness, but he’d still be comfortable enough to sleep.

When he came back into the bedroom, Eli was sitting up against the headboard, a book lying open on his lap. Silently, Crowley shoved his clothes into his overnight bag and crept around to the other side of the bed, sliding in between the cotton sheets and lying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling. He stayed like this, hardly daring to move or breathe, and listened to the gentle sounds of pages turning until Eli poked him in the shoulder.

“What?”

“Do you normally sleep like that?” Little lights danced in Eli’s eyes again, and Crowley knew he was teasing. “It doesn’t look very comfortable.”

“It isn’t.”

“Something’s bothering you, then, isn’t it?” And God, Crowley both hated and loved that Eli could read him like that, easier than any book.

“No,” Crowley lied, fingers bunching in the floral-patterned duvet. “Just… dunno. Not done this before.”

“Done what? You’ve nev- _oh_, right.”

Sometimes, very rarely, Eli forgot that Crowley hadn’t done any of this before. He usually remembered, usually tried to take it slow, but he tended to forget when things were going especially well. Crowley liked making him forget; it made him feel normal, like he was just Eli’s boyfriend and Eli was just his, with no strings attached. But then Crowley would be in a position of doing something he’d seen other people do but had never actually done, and the knowledge that he was a twenty-seven-year-old man with no romantic experience to speak of would land on his head like an anvil in an old cartoon. Eli always felt it, too, when this happened, and he’d been around long enough to know how Crowley acted when it did.

At the moment, Eli’s aborted _“You’ve never shared a bed with another person before?”_ was ringing in Crowley’s cherry-red ears. He hadn’t meant to be insulting - it hadn’t even been an insult at all, really - and yet the piece of Crowley that stayed cold and dark with the fear of being left was once more convinced that this would be the end of things.

Crowley swallowed hard, trying to get the lump in his throat to recede back into his gut, but it stayed there. Eli was staring at him, forehead pinched in concern, staying as still as he always did when Crowley got this way. He was giving Crowley time to process, time to find and use his words, so Crowley forced his thoughts around the blockage in his windpipe and spat them onto the bed.

“I don’t want to disturb you. I don’t… I dunno, I don’t want to get in your space.”

Eli raised an eyebrow and closed his book, setting it on the nightstand with a muffled thump.

“I want you in my space, Anthony. I don’t anticipate that I will _ever_ not want you in my space, but if the time comes that I decide I don’t, I’ll let you know.”

A frisson of joy, sparking and twitching like a live wire, crawled down Crowley’s spine. Slowly, he turned onto his side, reaching for Eli’s hand on top of the covers. Eli took it and _pulled_, dragging Crowley’s lithe body across the gap and only stopping when their sides were crushed together.

Eli had to do a little wiggle-and-shuffle movement to get down under the covers, and he looked so absurdly beautiful while doing it that Crowley couldn’t suppress a giggle. It was insane, really, how everything that Eli did looked better on him than it ever had on anyone else. A grown man wriggling around like a caught fish should have been unattractive, but it was so characteristically _Eli_ that Crowley was arse-over-elbow in love with it. _Of course_ Eli wouldn’t ask Crowley to budge up for a moment and slide down under the covers normally. He’d found some other way to get comfortable, a way that didn’t involve letting go of Crowley’s hand or moving Crowley’s torso away from where it was pressed against his.

It dawned on Crowley that Eli was not, and had never been, the type of man to give half a flying fuck about what other people usually did. Most booksellers wanted to sell their books; Eli helped people find things, yes, but he also kept his favorite books on the shelves in his flat so that he’d never have to list them in inventory. Most people in the business-owning world made some attempt at being fashionable, but Eli had never cared about fashion at all. He’d been wearing the same shirts, socks, and pants for the better part of a decade, and he just kept stitching up the holes (poorly, because he’d never learned how to sew) when the seams wore through. Most people in their twenties owned a television, but Eli wouldn’t be talked into buying one (or even taking Crowley’s and letting Crowley buy himself a new one) because he knew that it would take away from his value book-reading time.

Most people, Crowley realized as Eli’s arms came around him and hauled him up onto the warm, sturdy chest that he’d been dreaming of sleeping on, wouldn’t be this patient. Most people would have cut and run from the moment that they understood the true scope of Crowley’s fears and prior romantic aversion. Most people wouldn’t wait for him to catch his breath when he got overwhelmed. Most people wouldn’t stand him in front of a mirror and trace the lines of his skinny body and call him beautiful. Most people weren’t this _good_.

But Eli was, and Crowley was lying with his arm thrown across Eli’s shoulders and his head pillowed on Eli’s chest and his ankle locked around Eli’s calf. One strong pale arm was wrapped around Crowley’s skinny torso, holding Crowley gently but firmly. Briefly, Crowley considered the possibility that Eli was just as afraid of losing him as he was of losing Eli, but Eli’s words on the night of his worst nightmare flashed through his mind in neon technicolor.

_“Haven’t you considered that I don’t want to lose you, either?”_

He hadn’t said “I’m afraid of losing you.” He’d said “I don’t want to,” and that was a distinction that Crowley had never been able to make.

Crowley was terrified of losing Eli. Everything he did with Eli was tainted by fear in a way that he’d never been aware of before. Fear of loss drifted through Crowley’ actions like propane in the air, building up and growing thick until it either choked him or was ignited by the emotional equivalent of the flame of a struck match. He loved Eli, and he was _in love with_ Eli, but even that purest thing stank of flammable gas and the sulfur of unlit matches.

Even more than the fear, though, Crowley noticed that he was clinging to Eli’s presence in his life like those white curls and milk-chocolate eyes were the only things that mattered in the world, and he was holding on so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. And while Eli mattered - mattered more than most things - he couldn’t be the _only_ thing. He could be the Best Thing, certainly, and he already was, but Crowley’s fear of losing him had to change into something better. He needed to learn how to say “I don’t _want_ to” instead of “I’m afraid to.”

In the early hours of the morning on the day after Christmas, Anthony Crowley decided to do something that he’d never thought he would consider: go to therapy. He decided to do it because he was tired of being a man who refused to be more than the sum total of his fears and mistakes. He decided to do it because Eli deserved a man who could be hold on to what he wanted without strangling it, a man who could love without the crippling fear of losing his beloved. Crowley decided to be better because he was in love with a man who deserved it, but he also did it because he was really fucking tired of being afraid.

Underneath him, Eli shifted, and Crowley tilted his head back to look up at Eli. He liked the view from here, liked the way that he could see the crinkles in the skin beneath Eli’s chin and the long lines of Eli’s eyelashes. The dark eyes that he loved so much were open, looking at him with the same unfettered affection as before. When Crowley smiled, it was even more crooked than usual because half of it was crushed against Eli’s chest, but he didn’t care.

He was going to get better, and that was a good thing.

“What are you smiling about?”

_You_, Crowley didn’t say.

“Nothing. Just… happy, I think.”

“Oh?” Eli was smiling now, too, and Crowley could smell the peppermint from his toothpaste. They'd had this same conversation the night that Crowley had run barefoot across Soho a few weeks prior, but Crowley found that he was even happier now than he had been then.

That was the thing about loving someone, he'd come to find out. You never really stopped.

“Yeah,” Crowley said, and Eli's smile got so wide that it turned his lips into lines made of pink-colored pencil.

“Well, for what it’s worth, you should know that I’m happy, too.”

“Oh?” Crowley echoed with a wink.

“Very,” Eli said.

Crowley was quiet for a moment, taking silent gulps of air to try and stifle the words that were once more rising in his throat.

Eventually, “Angel?”

A hum rumbled through Eli’s chest. “Yes, my cariad?”

_I love you. I love you. I love you._ But no, it wasn’t the right time. If Crowley said those words now, in the darkened guest bedroom of Eli’s parents’ house, they would still taste like bitter gas. He hadn’t washed the fear off of them yet, and he knew that because he could feel fear’s black claws tighten around his heart.

It wasn’t time, not yet.

Crowley cleared his throat, and as the words slipped away into nothing once more, he said, “I… thank you. For bringing me here.”

Eli’s responding sigh mussed up Crowley’s dark hair. “Thank _you_ for coming. I was- well, I was quite afraid that you wouldn’t want to.”

Crowley’s eyebrows shot up. “Why?” _I’ll always want to._

“Christmas,” Eli explained. “And family. I thought maybe… I don’t know, I thought that you might prefer to stay in the city.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

Eli chuckled, and Crowley felt the vibrations of it in his bones. “Well. Good to know.”

“I’ll come with you anywhere.” Good, yes. That was close enough, for now.

Eli’s round face broke into one of the grins that put the sun to shame. “Jolly- yes, jolly good.”

Crowley tucked his arm around Eli’s waist, thrilling at the happy hum that he got in response. He’d hold Eli like this forever if he could, just pressing his hand to the curve of Eli’s waist and feeling the warmth from Eli’s body bleed into his.

“You are ridiculous, though,” Crowley said, turning slightly so that he could prop his chin up on Eli’s sternum. “No one says ‘jolly good’ anymore. I fuckin’... I don’t even know where you _heard_ that.”

“I didn’t _hear_ it anywhere,” Eli sniffed. “I read it. In a _book_.”

Crowley ducked his head and pressed a kiss to the spot where Eli’s heart was jumping. “Of course you did, you great bloody fossil.”

“Of course _you_ haven’t heard of it, you tech-obsessed heathen.” Crowley couldn’t see Eli’s eyes too clearly in the darkness, but he could imagine that they were full of stars once more.

He could, however, make out the indistinct outline of Eli’s lips as they stretched into a tongue-touched smile, and the sight of them stole Crowley’s breath. He was staring again, and this time, Eli asked about it.

“Do you know that you stare at me? Quite a lot, really.” Eli’s voice was quieter than normal, like he was trying to keep his question a secret.

Crowley hummed. “Uh-huh.”

“Why?”

“I never get tired of looking at you.” That was the truth (or half of it - he’d snapped his mouth shut before “because I love you” had been able to cross his tongue), and it was a very intimate thought, so Crowley’s face flushed at the same time as Eli’s.

“You- oh,_ really_, now, that’s- you’re just- _oh_.”

Grinning to himself, Crowley shifted around again and nestled back into Eli’s chest. He made a mental note that he could, apparently, make Eli lose his formidable powers of speech with words as well as kisses.

Silence fell again, and this time, no one broke it. After a few minutes, Eli’s breathing got deeper, and the heart dancing beneath Crowley’s head slowed from a salsa to a waltz. Crowley counted the beats, memorized the way that Eli’s arm felt around his shoulders, categorized the different kinds of inhales and exhales that filled the room. It was new, again, but it was another set of good things.

Eventually, though, Crowley’s eyes dropped shut. Falling asleep shouldn’t have been different, really; it should have been the same as it always was. But it was different. It was different because for the first time in his life, Crowley fell asleep with the sound of someone else’s heartbeat echoing in his ears.


	15. Fifteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Happy endings, y'all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is it, then. I can't believe that I've finished THREE of these type of stories, but I also know that I'll be writing more, so my life is just insane and that's how it is. 
> 
> You all have been wonderful. Thank you for sticking with me through the angst in this fic - it was hard to write, but it was cathartic. I hope that it was worth it!
> 
> I cannot possibly express my gratitude for the wonderful responses I've received on this story and others, but I will be saying thank you until the day I die anyway. 
> 
> Hugs and love, friends! If you don't have happiness, I pray that you find it. If you do, I pray that you keep it. 
> 
> -Hope

The changes were small at first, and they took the form of objects: a rubber band around his wrist, a chart of breathing exercises taped to his bathroom mirror, a small white pill swallowed each morning with the first sips of his coffee.

At first, the rubber band was an annoyance; it caught in the hairs on his forearm, it was an unfamiliar pressure, and it itched when he got sweaty. But when his breath caught in his throat for no reason, when he looked at Eli and found himself plunging head-first into the crippling fear of losing him, the band became important. The snapping of elastic against his wrist was never hard enough to really hurt (his therapist had been very clear about this), but it was enough of a sting that it broke him out of his thoughts.

The sheet of breathing exercises blocked part of his mirror, but that was the point. He was supposed to see it every day, supposed to remember that he had a way out of the panic and fidgety-stressed-_oh-fuck_ moments that reared their ugly heads early in the morning and late at night. Sometimes, Crowley would drag himself out of bed and brace himself against the sink, chest heaving and burning and lungs refusing to fill with air, and he’d look at that chart with tear-filled green eyes blown wide with fear. And then he’d lock a hand around his wrist, push his fingers against his pulse point, and force himself to count out even measures of seconds as he badgered his body into taking a breath. It was hard, harder than he wanted it to be, but it helped.

The pill was a challenge, too. It wasn’t hard to swallow, really, but what it represented was. In some ways, it had been a relief when he’d been given a diagnosis. It had meant that he wasn’t just a bad person, that he wasn’t just terrible at relationships and trust for no reason, that his problems focusing (or tendency to hyper-focus on one thing long enough that he forgot to eat meals) weren’t just all in his head. But it also meant that he was broken, and that wasn’t an easy thing to come to terms with. He’d known this for a while, of course, but there was something about seeing the name of his prescription punched with black ink onto white paper that made it real in a way it hadn’t been before.

Eli had been there the first time that he took it. He’d cut it in half like he was supposed to, put the other half back in the bottle, and stared at the tiny flakes of white that had been scattered in a lopsided ring around his first dosage. His hands had been frozen, and so he’d not been able to do anything more than just stand and stare at that half-moon of compacted powder.

But then Eli’s strong arms had wrapped around him, and one of the broad hands that Crowley knew he’d never grow tired of holding had reached out and lifted the pill off of the counter.

It wasn’t easy to describe what that did to him. It felt like Eli had touched the most fucked-up part of him, like he’d said that even the pieces of Crowley that were plastered with labels like I-can’t-breathe and I-don’t-trust and I-love-you-but-I’m-bad-at-it were worth holding.

So Crowley had set that piece of pill between his teeth and let a flood of delightfully bitter coffee carry it down his throat, and then he’d turned and kissed Eli. He’d kissed him for being there, for _wanting_ to be.

Eli was around more, now. If he wasn’t at Crowley’s flat, Crowley was usually at his. They spent most nights with their fingers locked together and bodies pressed close. Crowley fell asleep to the sound of Eli’s heartbeat more nights out of the week than not, and on a few occasions, he’d woken up with a piece of his hair caught in the buttons on Eli’s pajama shirt. They laughed about it when it happened (Eli accused him of wriggling around so much in the night that he managed to get himself trapped, and Crowley said that they wouldn’t have this problem if Eli would just take off the fucking shirt and let Crowley sleep on his chest), and they always managed to get Crowley’s head unstuck without too much trouble.

Sometimes, though, Eli got up in the middle of the night to make himself a cup of tea, or Crowley crawled out of bed to go draw in the faint light that shone through the window from the street. They were still very bad at sleeping through the night, and it wasn’t uncommon for one of them to come back to bed just as the other was getting up. It didn’t make sense, but Crowley loved that they both were bad at the same thing, and so the soft kisses in the navy-blue darkness of the first hours of morning were some of Crowley’s favorites.

He loved every kiss, of course. He loved the ones that Eli focused on with single-minded intensity just as much as the ones that missed their mark (they landed on the corner of his mouth or the top of his chin or the space between his lips and nose) because Eli was so excited to see him. He loved when he was reminded of Eli’s strength, loved the feeling of being crushed against Eli’s body by heavy arms as he was hauled in for a kiss that usually tasted like over-sugared tea. He loved the feeling of Eli’s lips pressed to other parts of his skin, too. The spots on his hands and chest and face were always warm for a moment after the kisses were gone, burning slowly like small fires, and Crowley loved it.

Sometimes he’d dream of these kisses, of picnics in the park and stargazing in the country. Sometimes he dreamed of a quaint cottage on the coast that Eli had filled with books and tartan-patterned pillows. The pantry was always stocked with tea and biscuits, and in his dreams, Crowley spent his afternoons cooking dinner and his evenings snuggled with Eli on the sofa. There were times that Crowley dreamed of dancing under the stars to the sounds of crickets and heartbeats, and there was a part of him that never wanted to wake up.

But when Crowley dreamed, it wasn’t always of good things. Sometimes his dreams were filled with black tuxedos and open graves, and sometimes he re-lived the last conversation with his father over and over and over again until he woke up with tears on his cheeks and a strangled cry caught in his throat. Sometimes, he dreamed that Eli had never been real, and the moments before his eyes flew open were full of images of straightjackets and padded walls. On nights when the darkness brought dreams like these, Crowley couldn’t wake up fast enough.

There was one good thing about his dreams, though, and that was that they all became nothing in the face of his real life. The best kisses in his dreams paled in comparison to the soft ones that would land on his lips or be trailed through his hair as he lay with his body thrown over Eli’s like the world’s most possessive snake. The smell of sea-salt air that filled the cottage in his head was forgotten when Crowley wandered into Eli’s kitchen, eyes sleep-heavy and jaw popping with a yawn, and found the smell of fresh coffee waiting for him (Eli didn’t even prefer coffee in the mornings, but he’d started making it for Crowley anyway). No night sounds could be a better soundtrack than the way Eli hummed outdated show tunes as he brushed his teeth in the ensuite.

His nightmares, too, weren’t as bad as they had been. Some nights, he would jolt awake, his entire body spasming with pain that didn’t even exist, but he never had to be afraid for long. Warm hands would pull him back down, tuck him safely inside the arms of the man he loved, and Eli would whisper comforts into his ear until his lungs remembered how to breathe. Sometimes this was done in English, and Eli’s lilting accent twisted the ends of words into softer-sounding things. Most often, though, it was in Welsh. Crowley never understood much of what was said, but he could feel the gentleness in Eli’s tone, and it was always enough.

On the increasingly rare occasions that Eli was not lying with Crowley on the nights when he dreamed, things were still better than alright. When he rolled over and crushed a smile he hadn’t known was there into his pillow, he made a mental note to kiss Eli a little more that day. The nights when he crashed back into reality with a stifled scream pressing against the inside of his lips, his skinny body drenched in sweat and tangled in the sheets he’d knotted with his thrashing about, he would run into the bathroom and throw on the light, and he’d make himself breathe. In the mornings that followed, he would make his way over to the bookshop. When he got there, he would hold Eli a little tighter, lace their fingers together with a squeeze, or take four and a half extra seconds to watch the way Eli’s fair hair almost glowed in the midwinter London light. He’d memorize the way Eli’s laugh sounded and the way Eli smiled at him from over a stack of books, taking pictures in his mind and storing them away.

The reason for the growing album of mental photos was simple: they were reminders of what he hadn’t yet lost. Memories of something he still had and was very much planning to keep.  
Crowley knew that he wasn’t good at this, yet, but he also knew that he was getting better. His pile of good things was growing, and he was learning how to be happy. He was finding out how to love without being terrified of losing, and that was far more than he’d thought himself capable of.

One night, Crowley took the rubber band off of his wrist before getting into the shower, and he hadn’t put it back on. The tape that held a page full of breathing exercises to the mirror was peeling at the edges, and parts of the paper had gotten blotchy and unreadable with dried water droplets. The first time that Crowley forgot to take his medication, he caught himself smiling as he was running back up the stairs to get it. Forgetting was good, sort of, because it meant that he was feeling _normal_. It didn’t mean that he didn’t need it - part of him suspected that he might need those little white circles for the rest of his life - but it meant that he didn’t feel quite so fucked up anymore.

*********

First “I love you”s in fairytales are romantic as hell. They take place on hillsides at sunset or in moments of last goodbyes, and there’s usually some sort of string quartet playing in the background. There’s always a profession of undying love, a long speech about never giving up on each other and being together until death, and the music swells as the couple shares their first kiss in the dying light of the sun or the rising silver shine of the moon.

“I love you”s in fairytales are perfect, the result of careful romance and vows of eternal self-sacrifice, and the people who say them do so with full intention of doing so. There isn’t ever any risk of one not loving the other back because stories of romantic love are always written in the stars. First “I love you”s are walked into carefully, with every step along the path planned out and the outcome already known.

The first time Crowley said “I love you” to Eli, it wasn’t anything close to a carefully planned step-after-step walk with a predestined good outcome. It was really more of a million-lightyear freestyle dive into absolute uncertainty performed by a diver who was blindfolded and had never actually been up this high before and who tripped on his last step off the diving board.

Eli had finally talked Crowley into going to a Shakespeare play (a conversation that consisted mostly of Eli kissing Crowley through an explanation of the plot of _Hamlet_ until Crowley finally agreed to go so that Eli would shut up and get on with the snogging), and so Crowley had come by to pick him up. He’d borrowed Anathema’s car and had bought himself a respectable-looking pair of nice trousers and a sports coat that actually fit him, and he was waiting rather impatiently on the front stoop of the bookshop. The car was parked at a meter around the corner, but he’d wanted to pick Eli up at the front door like a good boyfriend, and he was now regretting that decision because it was actually more than a bit cold out.

Crowley was halfway through his third variation of a standard _hurry up_ text when the door opened and Eli stepped into the street. He was wearing an obnoxiously-colored paisley bowtie under the collar of a shirt that might have once been a pale green but was now bordering on grey. His jacket and trousers were two very different shades of tan, and he was wearing a pair of scuffed brown brogues that clashed with the color of his belt.

He looked like he’d gotten dressed from the contents of a retired gay English professor’s closet. It was ridiculous, actually, how badly he’d matched his clothes (and he’d been the one who said that going to the theater was a bit of a posh event, which is why Crowley had bought his new things). He looked absurd, and Crowley’s chest ached with how much he loved him.

Eli’s dark eyes were filled with a thousand pinpricks of light, and he grinned at Crowley.

“You look positively dashing, my darling.”

An appropriate response would have been “Thank you.” Crowley’s typical response would have been “You’re beautiful.” He could have, if he’d wanted, even said nothing and just kissed Eli in the middle of the sidewalk.

He didn’t, though. The wave of love that had passed through Crowley’s brain was enough to make all of his usual restraint go offline, and so Crowley said something very different.

“I… you… oh, _fuck_, I love you.”

It was early evening on a Saturday in early March in London Soho, and they were late for their dinner reservations, and there were _bloody people walking in between them_, and Crowley had chosen that moment to say something that he’d been thinking for months (and trying to figure out how to say out loud for somewhere around a week and a half - his therapist had reminded him that using his words was a good thing, and he finally felt ready to work out a plan for saying it).

As soon as he realized what he’d done, Crowley turned as red as the handkerchief in the breast pocket of his new coat and looked down at his shoes.

Trip, flailing fall, splash.

“You… what?”

Funny. He’d never realized that this pair of boots had purple stitching.

He could play it off like he’d said something else, maybe. He could save this moment if he really put his back into it, could convince Eli that he’d heard wrong. He could do that, possibly, but it would potentially require actually denying what he’d said, and that he couldn’t do.

So, Crowley shoved his hands into his pockets, took a deep breath (in for two seconds, hold it, out for two seconds) and raised his head to meet Eli’s eyes.

“I said that I love you.” A blonde woman raised an eyebrow at him, but Crowley decided not to care. He kept his gaze locked on Eli’s face, trying to convey his sincerity from four feet away.

For his part, Eli looked like he was about to faint. He’d gone shockingly pale, and he was shaking like a leaf inside of his mismatched layers. His dark eyes were too wide, searching Crowley’s face for any sign of deception or teasing, looking Crowley over from hair to chin like he expected Crowley’s expression to change into a smile or a laugh at any moment.

Eli, Crowley realized with a mixture of relief and horror, was scared.

That simply wouldn’t do. So Crowley crossed the four-foot chasm, took Eli by the hand, and yanked him into the bookshop (which, he noted with self-satisfaction, was unlocked - he’d surprised Eli enough to make him forget to lock up). He locked the door behind him, noticing that he was strangely calm in spite of the fact that he’d potentially just bollocksed up his entire relationship by saying a very stupid thing.

Eli was still staring at him when he turned back around, cheeks flushed pink and mouth hanging slightly open. He wasn’t saying anything, and it didn’t look like he was about to, so Crowley decided to say it again.

“Sorry,” Crowley said, out of breath for reasons that were Eli-beauty related rather than Crowley-anxiety related. “Not sure if you could hear me out there-” he was entirely sure that Eli had heard him, but it was as good a justification as any “-but, yeah. I love you.”

Before Crowley could so much as blink, Eli had fisted his hands into the lapels of Crowley’s sports coat and shoved him back against the wall, and then he’d yanked Crowley’s head down to his level so he could kiss him like it was his sole purpose in life.

_Oh,_ Crowley thought, smiling against Eli’s lips. _That’s good, then._

Eli pulled back after a moment, looking at Crowley’s face once more with the same kind of scrutiny as he’d done when Crowley’s stupid brain had first given his even stupider mouth permission to say those three words.

“I’m being serious,” Crowley said, and the last traces of tension in Eli’s face vanished. “Seriously, angel, I lo-”

One of Eli’s hands flew from Crowley’s lapel to cover his mouth, so the final half of that phrase was said against Eli’s thick fingers.

“Slow,” Eli murmured, sounding shaky and out of breath, “slow down. Let me say- let me.” He paused, hand still braced on both of Crowley’s cheeks, and Crowley’s heart jumped in his chest.

And then, “I love you, too.”

Crowley’s responding laugh was muffled by Eli’s hand, but he didn’t care._ I love you, too. I love you, too. I love you, too._

It wasn’t clear whether Crowley reached down to kiss Eli or Eli jumped up to kiss him, but regardless of how it happened, their trembling lips found each other again. Not for the first time in Crowley’s life, the world momentarily stopped turning, and it was good.

“Come on,” Crowley finally whispered, lips brushing Eli’s with every word. “We’ll miss the play.”

“_Fuck_ the play,” Eli said vehemently, and Crowley laughed again.

“I paid for the tickets already, we’re bloody going. Besides, you’ve been going on about this for weeks.”

“Don’t care.”

“You _do_.”

“Kiss me again?”

“Say please.” Crowley was grinning again, and he felt the warmth of the air from Eli’s giggle brush across his mouth.

“Please, then. Kiss me again, _please_.”

Crowley, obviously, did as he was told.

It wasn’t until they were walking into the theater that Eli turned to him, teasing smile on his kiss-reddened lips and laughing candles twinkling in his eyes, and asked a question that Crowley had been hoping he’d forget about.

“In the middle of the street? Really?”

Crowley’s ears flared red. “Shut it, you idiot.”

“I love you,” Eli said in response, and Crowley dropped their tickets into a puddle.

*********

Walls, by their very nature, either keep things out or block them in. The ones around Crowley’s heart had done both for most of his life, and they were strong and impenetrable until the day that he’d met a blond-haired bookseller on a sunny Saturday afternoon in St. James’ Park. Without knowing it, he’d put cracks in the bricks and mortar, and he’d paved the way for other things to help with the breaking.

Erosion happens with wind and water, mainly, and this was how Crowley’s walls started to fall. A curly-haired PhD student with a penchant for stealing Crowley’s toast and mocking his lack of love life was the wind that swirled around and ripped through the cracks, chipping off pieces and widening gaps. There had been a woman in the dining room of a fancy restaurant who had hugged Crowley and apologized to him for things that she herself had never done, and she’d become a part of the wind, too.

The water rose slowly, at first, taking the form of a green-and-later-red-haired art curator who’d come into the shop for a tattoo. And then it had started rushing, started beating against the walls in Crowley’s chest and breaking off chunks of hardened resignation. Somewhere in the world was another few bucketfuls of water, walking around with a rainbow-colored quote hidden beneath her shirt on her shoulder blade.

But mostly, there had been Eli. Eli had been the most beautiful hurricane. Wind and water and lightning and thunder, larger than life and stronger-willed than anyone Crowley had ever met. He’d done the ripping apart, the tearing to pieces, and Crowley would never stop loving him for it.

When Crowley came into the room, Eli was sitting in bed, fingers carefully turning the pages of a book he’d read a dozen times. He looked beautiful, and Crowley loved him.

For a moment, Crowley stood and watched the way that the smallest muscles in Eli’s face changed with the mood of the characters on the page. It was fascinating to watch him read, to see him get so wrapped up in the world he’d found that he forgot that there was anything else outside of that time and that place and those people.

“Hi,” Crowley said, and Eli jumped a little. “Got something to show you.”

“Oh?” The book fell to Eli’s bedside table, forgotten.

“Mmm.” Silent as always, Crowley padded over to the bed and sank down on the edge of it, his lower back resting against Eli’s thighs. He set four things down on the blanket next to his leg: a red sketchbook, a purple sketchbook, and two thin books that had been a gift from a friend.

“What’s… oh. Those are my books, the ones I gave you.” It didn’t need to be a question because Eli recognized them on sight (of course he did).

“Did I ever tell you that I read them?”

One of Eli’s eyebrows climbed into his curls. “No.”

Crowley picked up _The Importance of Being Earnest_ and turned it over in his hands. “Probably… oh, I dunno. Twenty times? Twenty-five?”

Eli giggled. “Really?”

“Think I might’ve read the inscription a couple times every day for the better part of six months.”

Crowley was treading lightly, choosing his words carefully. What he was doing was dangerous, sort of, because it was so vulnerable. He was laying out the entire chronological history of loving Eli Fell, and he wasn’t sure how Eli would respond.

Right now, apparently, Eli was choosing to respond by staring at him with watery eyes, so Crowley continued.

“This one?” _Fahrenheit 451_. “A dozen, at least. Again, read the bit you wrote on the inside cover somewhere ‘round a hundred times.”

“I would have given you more books, you know,” Eli said slowly. “If you’d asked.”

When Crowley shook his head, some of his waves fell in front of his eyes, and they stayed there until Eli reached over and brushed them back into place. “Not the point. You gave these to me, see? Just because you wanted to.”

Eli sighed. “You stupid man. I’d give you every book I own if I thought it would make you happy.”

Crowley shook his head again, harder this time. “I liked these because they made me feel close to you, back when… when I didn’t have you. When you were someone else’s, or when you were no one’s.”

The chocolate of Eli’s eyes melted, and a tear trailed down over the curve of his cheek. “Oh.”

With shaky fingers, Crowley slid the two sketchbooks up the bed until they came to rest at Eli’s hips.

_These, too,_ he wanted to say but didn't. _Look at them, and please don’t run away._

Crowley was the type of artist who dated his drawings so that he could look back on them and track his progress. This was good, usually, and it was fine because no one other than him typically looked at his sketchbooks. But now, _now_ it was potentially incriminating evidence because these books were full of Eli, and the date on the first page was the same as it had been on the day he’d sat on a bench and drawn the most beautiful man he’d ever seen.

Eli was silent, _reverent_, as he flipped through the pages. Sometimes he gasped, a small sound under his breath, or smiled at something, but he didn’t say a word. He looked and breathed, and Crowley watched him and didn’t.

The last page of the red sketchbook was the most recent drawing, and it was one that Crowley had agonized over for a long time. Some of the other drawings had people other than Eli in them; Seaghan was featured in a few, and Anathema, and Eli’s parents. But the man in the last drawing was someone Crowley had never drawn successfully before.

Eli looked from the page to Crowley and back again, and he smiled. “You did it.”

Crowley’s lungs managed to capture some oxygen. “Yeah?”

“Yes,” Eli said, looking down at it again. “Yes, that’s you.”

“That’s _us_,” Crowley corrected, because it was.

He’d only really seen the two of them together on one occasion, and it was burned into his memory, so he’d drawn it. They had been standing in front of a mirror, and Eli had called him beautiful, and Crowley had kissed him. He knew that he owed Eli a portrait of himself, but he didn’t want to draw one of himself alone, so he’d picked the moment that he first started to see himself as something other than a monster.

“Anthony,” Eli said softly, “how long have you loved me?”

It was a big question - the _biggest_ question, maybe - but it had a very simple answer.

“Forever, I think.”

When Eli kissed him, it didn’t feel like a hurricane. It didn’t feel forceful or strong or capable of breaking down walls, and that was because it didn’t need to be anymore. The walls that had been built around Crowley’s heart had long since crumbled, and if he knew anything at all, it was that he never _ever_ wanted to put them back again.

Eli was a hurricane, yes, but only when he needed to be. Most of the time, though, he was the most beautiful thing in the world. He was gentle and kind, and he had a laugh like music and an accent that turned ordinary words into poetry. He was warm and soft, and he was short enough that Crowley had to bend over to kiss him. He had no fashion sense and the vocabulary of a grandfather, and he was a terrible cook and a bookseller who only sold the books he didn’t like as much.

Mostly, though, he was Crowley’s favorite thing in existence, and Crowley loved him, and that was good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading!! If you feel like checking out some more of my Good Omens Human AUs, you can find them at the links below!
> 
> A Careful Kind of Something [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19277116/chapters/45845899)
> 
> The Best Laid Plans [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19747336/chapters/46740028)
> 
> Miracles (or How to Fall in Love) [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21097244)
> 
> If you do read any of them, please stop by and say hello! I'd love to hear from you. xx

**Author's Note:**

> I finally caved in and got a [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/hope-inthedark)! Come say hi :)
> 
> Also, if you would like to make any sort of creative work (art, podfic, whatever) based on this or any of my stories, consider this blanket permission to do so! I only ask that you would tag me in your work so that I can see it and share it! Thank you for being here, and thank you for reading. I hope you are having the best day!


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